Meta Platforms Inc, which owns Facebook, said on Monday that it would add more information to its public ad database about how marketers choose to target their ads for political and social issues.
Meta said it would add specific targeting information for these individual ads to its “Facebook Open Research and Transparency” database, which is used by academic researchers. This is an extension of a test that began last year.
Jeff King, Meta’s vice president of business integrity, said on the phone, “Instead of looking at how a Facebook ad was sent, it’s going to look at an advertising strategy for what they were trying to do.”
In recent years, the social media giant has been under pressure to be more open about targeted advertising on its platforms, especially during elections. In 2018, it made a public ad library, but several academics criticized it for having bugs and not having enough data about how to target ads.
Meta said that the ad library would soon have a summary of targeting information for a page’s social issue, election, or political ads.
“For example, the Ad Library may show that a Page ran 2,000 ads about social problems, elections, or politics in the last 30 days, and that 40% of the money they spent on these ads was aimed at ‘those who live in Pennsylvania’ or ‘people who are interested in politics,'” Meta said in a blog post.
Meta says that the new information will be added to the ad library in July. It said that verified researchers would be able to access the data at the end of May. The data will include information from August 2020 to the present.
As part of its efforts to be open, the company has worked with outside researchers on a number of projects. In its “Social Science One” project, it admitted last year that wrong data had been sent to academics because of a technical problem.
In 2021, the company said that it had shut down the accounts of a group of New York University scholars who were looking at political ads on its platform. This was done to protect the privacy of its customers.
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