Our current tools, projects and ideas

How are online political ads being used in 2024?

  • Working with Liberties.EU and many in-country partners to track the use of political advertising in the EU
  • Collaborating with the University of Manchester to study the US and UK elections.
  • Monitoring the use of ads in other elections around the world.
  • Continuing to build what we learn into our tools.

The Who Targets Me browser extension

  • Learn more about who’s targeting you with political Facebook ads.
  • Available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge

Trends

  • Our tool that tracks political digital ad spending across over 75,000 advertisers in more than 50 countries.
  • Data on how political advertisers target voters (beta, in collaboration with Fabio Votta)
  • Summarising the issues parties are talking about in their ads

Political ad data standards

  • A proposal to standardise political ad transparency data to make analysis and accountability easier.

Decoder

  • Shows how Trump and Biden targeted and optimised over 500,000 Facebook ads in the 2020 election campaign (now archived).

Github

  • Where all of the code for our projects lives.

Other ideas we’re working on

  • Mapping where ads appear to see which places political parties prioritise.
  • Improving the information needed to “read” political advertising by adding more context at the point people see their ads.
  • AI-powered tagging of advertisers and adverts by goal
  • AI-powered content summaries and analysis of advertising
  • Advertiser blocking – to allow users to block single, or groups of, political advertisers
  • Expanding beyond Facebook – to provide a wider suite of tools to protect users from low-quality information online
  • For any other ideas you think would improve transparency of political advertising (data, visualisations, crowdsourcing tools and more), email us!