Meta Updates Transparency Efforts on Social Issue, Electoral, Political Ads

Meta detailed updates Monday related to its transparency tools for social issue, electoral and political ads, which will apply to all countries where the company’s ad authorizations and disclaimer tools are in place. Detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral and political ads will be made available to vetted academic researchers at the end of May through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency environment. Data will be provided for each individual ad, including interest categories selected by advertisers. Vice president of business integrity Jeff King said in a blog post Monday that this update is an expansion of the pilot that started last May to provide targeting information for ads about social issues, elections and politics leading up to the 2020 U.S. election, and data is now available for all ads in those categories that ran globally since August 2020. King reiterated that FORT was created to enable qualified academic researchers to study social media’s impact on society, and measures are in place to protect the privacy of individual users. And starting in July, Meta’s Ad Library will add a summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads run after launch, including data on the total number of ads in those categories run by a page using each type of targeting—such as demographics, location and interests—and the percentage of social issue, electoral and political ad spend used to target those options. Meta will also indicate whether a page used custom audiences and/or lookalike audiences. King offered as an example, “For example, the Ad Library could show that over the past 30 days, a page ran 2,000 ads about social issues, elections or politics, and 40% of its spend on these ads was targeted to ‘people who live in Pennsylvania’ or ‘people who are interested in politics.’” Then-Facebook’s commitment to these transparency efforts came under question last August, when the company suspended the accounts of researchers from New York University who were behind browser extension Ad Observer, which was created to make it easier for people such as journalists, policy makers and researchers to search political ads by specific election and state. Ad Observer also collected information that was not otherwise publicly available, such as information on why users saw particular ads, user names and links to user profiles. Director of product management Mike Clark responded in a Newsroom post at the time, “For months, we’ve attempted to work with NYU to provide three of their researchers the precise access they’ve asked for in a privacy protected way. Today, we disabled the accounts, applications, pages and platform access associated with NYU’s Ad Observatory project and its operators after our repeated attempts to bring their research into compliance with our terms. NYU’s Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook, in violation of our terms of service. We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order.” King concluded, “By making advertiser targeting criteria available for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, elections and politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies. We are committed to providing meaningful transparency, while also protecting people’s privacy. In updating our tools, we solicited advice from external experts in the academic community and civil society on how to best achieve both of these important objectives, and we will continue to do so as we continue to evolve these tools.”

Politics

Meta Updates Transparency Efforts on Social Issue, Electoral, Political Ads

Ad Library will add a summary of targeting information starting in July

David Cohen

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David Cohen