Policy

  • Changes to Trends (Nov 2025)

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    Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a major update to our Trends political advertising tracker. From today, those changes are live. Here’s an explanation of what we’ve done: 1. Expanded data access now requires a free login Trends tracks activity by over 125,000 political advertisers, across more than 1,000 political parties and…

  • Meta and Google’s Ad Ban Upends Political Campaigning in Europe

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    Originally published in Tech Policy Press, 22nd Oct 2025 The collective decision by Meta and Google to ban political, social and issue-based ads in the European Union, citing the European Union’s new Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, is a seismic shift that will fundamentally reshape political campaigning across the continent. Some will…

  • Does US ownership of TikTok matter for political ads and campaigns?

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    TikTok is about to be split in two. The largest social media market in the world, the US, will soon forcibly acquire the company’s American operations and put it in the hands of a conglomerate of tech and media billionaires. They will be able to run it however they choose. How might the two TikToks…

  • Studying the monetisation of low-credibility content

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    We worked with Science Feedback to examine the financial infrastructure that enables misinformation in Europe. We performed a broad, multi-methods analysis of advertising and monetisation practices across major social media services offering ads to look at the difference in the monetisation rates of low- and high-credibility content. Read the full report and research. We’re grateful…

  • The disappearing ad library

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    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…

  • Building realtime maps

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    We’ve wanted to build realtime maps of where ads are being targeted for a long time. Ideally, we want to combine that with data about how much is being spent in particular places, and being able to show the political competition underway there. In 2024, we had our first go at doing that, where we…