Starting Monday, academics and researchers whoare registered with an initiative called the Facebook Open Research andTransparency project will be allowed to see data on how each political orsocial ad was used to target people. The information includes which interest categories— such as “people who like dogs” or “people who enjoy the outdoors” — werechosen to aim an ad at someone.
In addition, Meta said it planned to includesummaries of targeting information for some of its ads in its publicly viewableAd Library starting in July. The company created the Ad Library in 2019 sojournalists, academics and others could obtain information and help safeguardelections against the misuse of digital advertising.
While Meta has given outsiders some accessinto how its political ads were used in the past, it has restricted the amountof information that could be seen, citing privacy reasons. Critics have claimedthat the company’s system has been flawed and sometimes buggy, and havefrequently asked for more data.
That has led to conflicts. Meta previouslyclashed with a group of New York University academics who tried ingesting largeamounts of self-reported data on Facebook users to learn more about theplatform. The company cut off access to the group last year, citing violationsof its platform rules.
The new data that is being added to theFacebook Open Research Transparency project and the Ad Library is a way toshare information on political ad targeting while trying to keep data on itsusers private, the company said.
“By making advertiser targeting criteriaavailable for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, electionsand politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used toreach potential voters on our technologies,” the company said in a statement.
With the new data, for example, researchersbrowsing the Ad Library could see that over the course of a month, a Facebookpage ran 2,000 political ads and that 40% of the ad budget was targeted to“people who live in Pennsylvania” or “people who are interested in politics.”
Meta said it had been bound by privacy rulesand regulations on what types of data it could share with outsiders. In aninterview, Jeff King, a vice president in Meta’s business integrity unit, saidthe company had hired thousands of workers over the past few years to reviewthose privacy issues.
“Every single thing we release goes through aprivacy review now,” he said. “We want to make sure we give people the rightamount of data, but still remain privacy conscious while we do it.”
The new data on political ads will cover theperiod from August 2020, three months before the last US presidential election,to the present day.
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