Resources

Ad Observatory–now available in Spanish and English–is a project of NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy and provides access to explore political advertising across Meta, including Facebook and Instagram. Search by keywords, a topic, sponsor, or region to see an analysis on spend, messaging trends, and more. Learn about Ad Observatory and how to use it for investigations.

Help out by contributing your Facebook and YouTube ads by installing the Ad Observer plug-in tool.

In the afternoon of January 6, 2021, Facebook leadership announced they were “appalled by the violence at the Capitol today,” and were approaching the situation “as an emergency.”

Ad Observatory data provides insight on messaging associated with winning campaigns by party and other factors

An investigation by Global Witness and the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) team looked at Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube's ability to detect and remove death threats against election workers in the run up to the US midterm elections.

Despite information gaps for Spanish speaking voters, federal candidates are largely sticking to English ads on Facebook and Instagram.

An investigation by Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) team at NYU looked at Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube's ability to detect and remove election disinformation in the run-up to the US midterm elections.The results? TikTok approved 90% of the election disinformation ads tested, Facebook had a mixed record. Only YouTube succeeded both in detecting the ads and suspending the channel carrying them.

This paper reviewed ad traffic on YouTube with a goal of learning how creators of conspiracy content monetize their work.

In the first known study to quantify the performance of Facebook’s political ad policy enforcement at a large and representative scale, researchers found that when making decisions on how to classify undeclared ads, Facebook often missed political ads while falsely labeling others as political. The political ads that Facebook misses also disappear from its public archive, putting them out of reach for public scrutiny.

Proposal spells out criteria that trigger transparency requirement, with ad data to be collected by government agency

Across the political spectrum, posts from news sources that regularly traffic in misinformation have a statistically significant and large engagement advantage–by a factor of six–-over posts from news sources that have a record of factualness.

In total, ads with political content included in these archives have generated between 8.67 billion - 33.8 billion impressions and that sponsors have spent over $300 million USD on advertising with U.S. political cont

Public dataset of political ads observed by users of our browser extension.

Public dataset of ads we have collected from Facebook’s Ad Library for the US, Canada, and the UK. Access is limited to verified academic researchers and journalists who have access to Facebook’s Ad Library API, and managed by Harmony Labs.

Public dataset of historical transparency reports published by Facebook.

Open-source code for Ad Observatory, our analysis and data collection.