Who Targets Me’s first product was our browser extension.
Before Meta offered an ad library, it allowed us to crowdsource the political ads people were being targeted with and better explain which ads were showing up to different people in different places, and how those ads were targeted.
It still does, but the extension now goes further for users, and for us, as researchers of political ads.
For users of the extension, the software shows you who’s targeting you by matching ads against a global database of over 100,000 political advertisers, along with statistics, charts and lists designed to make it easier to put those ads in context.
For us as researchers (and for the organisations we work with), it allows us to offer surveys about people’s perceptions of ongoing political campaigns, integrating with common research tools and panels to create high quality data.
Why do we still offer it now the platforms offer ad transparency?
While the platforms offer ad libraries, they are still inadequate to answer a wider set of questions we, and others, might have. These include:
- What do different types of social media ads do users see in aggregate? Ad libraries can show you most of the ads that have been running, but don’t tell you much about the experience of seeing them. The browser extension acts to create a unique set of timelines of the ads that people see over time, across many advertisers, allowing us to understand more about the mixture of information people are exposed to.
- What do platforms miss? No platform will claim to be perfect. They miss politically significant ads all the time, to a greater or lesser degree
- How can we help people better understand what they see? The results page of the extension helps its users explore data about the ads they see. This can help us understand which data, tools and literacy interventions are helpful. It allows us to go beyond the minimal interventions offered by the platforms and try something different.
What are the extension’s limitations?
The biggest limitation is that people now spend a lot of time on their phone or tablet (it’s likely you’re reading this on one of those), and browser extensions simply don’t work on mobile devices. Mobile browsers don’t allow it, and even if they did, most social media is consumed through apps, which don’t allow the sort of seamless data donation possible via a desktop browser.
A second limitation we’re often asked about is “how do you get a representative sample?”. The answer is that often, we don’t. The extension provides an indicative picture of what people see, but not one that looks exactly like the full range of voters in a given country. Typically, our users are people who care about the internet and politics, tend to be a fraction younger than the national average, more tech literate, more urban and generally more male. We don’t want it to be that way, and we would love to have panels that accurately reflect an electorate, but putting that together is very expensive, and we simply don’t have the money (nb: we have done some projects where we have recruited via pollsters, and they’ve been interesting and successful. If you want to work with us on that, get in touch).
The final limitation is one we’ve just overcome. Previously, the extension only worked on Facebook. We would often get told “no one uses Facebook any more” (this is, of course, simply not true), but nonetheless, we have expanded the extension to now cover all of the main social media services that allow paid political ads. When you install the extension, you can choose which services you want it to track.
So what’s next?
The extension results are going to get a visual overhaul and the next iteration will reflect data that comes from all of the services it now tracks. It will also integrate more closely with Trends, our service that tracks spending, messaging and targeting across the entire digital political ad market. We hope to launch the improvements to the extension results in Q1 2025.
If this leaves you with any questions about our plans for the extension, or you’ve ideas we should adopt to make it better, please get in touch and let us know!