Meta Platform Inc., Shares Data About Targeting Political Ads And Social Issues On Facebook

Facebook stores a lot of data about advertisers. (photo: pixay)

JAKARTA - Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc on Monday, May 23, promised to share more data about the targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social issues ads in its public ad database.

Meta said they will also include detailed targeting information for these individual ads in the "Facebook Open Research and Transparency" database used by academic researchers, in an expansion of a pilot launched last year.

"Instead of analyzing how an ad is delivered by Facebook, it actually runs and looks at the advertiser's strategy for what they're trying to do," Jeff King, Meta's vice president of business integrity, told Reuters.

The social media giant has faced pressure in recent years to provide transparency around targeted advertising on its platform, particularly around elections. In 2018, they launched a public advertising library, although some researchers criticized it for its distractions and lack of detailed targeting data.

Meta says the ad library will immediately display a summary of targeting information for a social issue, election, or political ad run by a page.

"For example, the Ad Library could show that over the past 30 days, Pages ran 2.000 ads about social, election, or political issues, and that 40% of their spending on these ads was targeted at 'people living in Pennsylvania' or 'people living in Pennsylvania' or 'people interested in politics,'" Meta said in a blog post.

Meta says additional information in the ad library will be added in July. Data for the investigators examined will be available at the end of May and will display information from August 2020.

The company has run various programs with external researchers as part of its transparency efforts. Last year, it said a technical glitch meant flawed data had been passed to academics in the "Social Science One" project.

In 2021, the company said it had deactivated the accounts of a group of New York University researchers who studied political advertising on its platform due to user privacy concerns.