Policy

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…

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…

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…

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…

On 27th November, Google announced it would stop carrying political ads in the EU before new political advertising regulations kick in next year. Google currently has a “weak” definition of political ads (essentially they’re ads run by national parties and candidates during election periods), versus Meta’s rather stronger one (the wider “political and issue ads”…