This weekend, seven years after it first launched in the US, the Meta Ad Library (MAL) stops growing.
When it launched in 2018, Meta (then Facebook) said it would store a comprehensive, searchable database of political ads on its services for seven years. Since then, the MAL has been used by academics, journalists, civil society and individual voters to monitor political campaigns, track disinformation and hold Meta itself to account. The increased transparency (along with other policy changes) has deterred an unknown number of misuses of the platform by local and foreign powers from running illicit campaigns to try and influence the public. It’s been an extremely valuable resource, and will continue to be so – none of these issues will ever go away.
On Saturday, the MAL turns seven, and the earliest ads (initially US) in the archive will start to disappear. Due to Meta’s phased launches of ad libraries for different countries, others will follow later. In the UK, data will be removed starting in late November. For the EU, the great evaporation begins in April next year, followed by Canadian data that June, then Argentina, with Brazil next in early 2027. By 2029, it’ll be everyone, everywhere (you can check your country’s approximate date in the Meta Ad Library Report by clicking “All dates” near the bottom of the page, seeing when the first ads were included and adding seven years).
Does it matter that ads will disappear from the MAL? We think it does.
Firstly, political ads are an artefact. They’re evidence and history. Do you want to understand what parties and candidates did in the 2018 US midterms? The 2019 UK election? The ads they ran can help tell the story. Election material can feel very ephemeral – after all, today’s leaflets are in tomorrow’s recycling box – but for those of us who care about the way politics is conducted, we do want to be able to see how things evolve over time.
Second, seven years is an arbitrary choice for retaining the data. Meta would argue it’s long enough for people to have worked out which questions they have about political ads to grab the data they need. But this isn’t guaranteed. Holding the data for longer is virtually costless given the scale of Meta’s computing infrastructure (we’d bet that a single second of Facebook takes up more “space” than a year of political ads). Why don’t they just let the archive grow and grow? Our data was just used to publish a paper about the 2017 UK election. We get regular requests from academics looking to understand the impact of platform policy changes over the last seven years. The large coalition of researchers who worked directly with Facebook to study the US 2020 election haven’t yet published all of their work. There are still questions out there to be answered, and the data to answer them is starting to be hidden from view.
Third, the seven years that have passed since Meta introduced the MAL have been ample time for governments to develop regulation that promotes and standardises transparency including setting clear expectation for ad libraries and data retention. Have they done that? Not really. Meta’s original move – to get out ahead of inevitable legislation and create a version of an ad library that suited them – has worked perfectly. They’ve drawn the sting of criticism, set the bar where they wanted it (admittedly, higher than Google’s) and waited. In Europe, some regulation is now crawling into view, as implementation of the DSA and the Trust and Transparency of Political Advertising (TTPA) begins. In most other countries, including the UK, nothing has happened to mandate ad libraries, data retention or transparency standards.
Lastly, things could get worse. We are told that the era of tech accountability is over. The Trump administration clearly isn’t going to do anything to rein in the power of the big platforms, who are seen as key exporters and innovators being stymied by excessive, punitive EU regulation. Meta has already bent its content moderation rules towards “free speech” (and lower costs). Without clear rules mandating it, will they feel they need to maintain their ad library into the future? Google has already announced it will withdraw from political advertising in Europe due to the “uncertain” impact of new regulation. In the one place that requires it, Europe’s TTPA only demands five years of data retention (a weakness of the legislation), so it wouldn’t be at all surprising for Meta to align itself with that in future (unless of course, it wants to stick with seven, and use the line “we already exceed the EU’s regulations” repeatedly as part of its corporate advocacy).
It’d be good to see some action on this.
Meta should:
- U-turn on the deletion of ads and recognise the value this change would provide. It would be an extremely minor technical change to do this (they’re almost certainly not deleting them anyway, they’ll be sat on a server somewhere forever).
Governments should:
- Hurry to get political ad transparency and ad libraries included in their next package of democratic and electoral reforms. It’s not particularly difficult or controversial, and there are lots of good things that can be borrowed from the EU’s legislation.
When we started Who Targets Me in 2017, we thought we’d be on a 12 month mission to get the transparency needed for political ads. We’re still going. And we’ll keep going.