CIOInsider India Magazine
Meta to Share Political Ad Targeting Data with Researchers
Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc promised to share more data with targeting choices made by advertisers that run political and social-related issues in their public advertisement database to researchers.
Additionally, Meta will include detailed targeting information for individual ads in the ‘Facebook Open Research and Transparency’ which is used by academic researchers in an expansion of a pilot.
Meta admitted that it is looking at an advertiser strategy for what they were trying to do, rather than analyzing how an ad was delivered by Facebook.
The social media giant has been immersed in scrutiny over providing transparency around targeted advertising on its platforms in recent years, especially during elections. In 2018, it established a public ad library, and faced criticism from some researchers for its glitches and a lack of detailed targeting.
Meta has resisted sharing more specific targeting data since it believes it would be too easy to reverse engineer who viewed what ads and infer certain traits about individual users
This information in the ad library will be added by July this year and the data vetted for researchers will be available by the end of this month possessing information since August 2020.
“For example, the Ad Library could show that over the last 30 days, a Page ran 2,000 ads about social issues, elections or politics, and that 40 percent of their spend on these ads was targeted to 'people who live in Pennsylvania' or 'people who are interested in politics”, wrote Meta.
As a part of its transparency efforts, Meta has run various programs with external researchers. Last year it encountered a technical error that meant flawed data provided to its academics in its ‘Social Science One’ project.
The same year, the social media giant disabled accounts of New York University researchers who were studying political advertisements on its platform due to user privacy concerns.
Meta has resisted sharing more specific targeting data since it believes it would be too easy to reverse engineer who viewed what ads and infer certain traits about individual users.
