Facebook has announced it’s adding new tools to its Ad Library to track political ad spend more effectively.
With under 80 days left until the 2020 US Presidential Election, Facebook has announced new features in its Ad Library to help bring more transparency into how different campaigns are using ads on its platform.
As explained by Facebook’s Director of Product Management, Rob Leathern, the new features “will be helpful to researchers, journalists, and people as we enter this period and beyond.”
Related | Reddit Makes Big Changes To Its Political Ads Policy
Now, when you go to the Ad Library to view ads run by a specific page, you’ll also be able to see all the other advertisers that have run ads with the shared “paid for by” disclaimer. “A shared disclaimer means the advertisers explicitly shared it via our tool & have at least one shared organization funding them,” explains Leathern.
We’re 78 days from the US election. Greater transparency into political ads is a goal for me, my team and the company. Today we’re introducing several new Ad Library features that will be helpful to researchers, journalists and people as we enter this period and beyond (1/4)
— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) August 17, 2020
In addition to the above, Facebook will also be adding the Vice President and other party VP candidates to its presidential spend tracker, which you can add on your site or in articles, with a new widget.
The spend tracker is particularly helpful as it lets you see all the campaign ads run from those pages as well.
While it isn’t much, it’s certainly a step in the right direction – at least in terms of being able to use these tools to get a better understanding as to how funding is being allocated for support of specific politicians.
Following the intense criticism that it faced after the 2016 election, Facebook is doing its best to avoid any issues of transparency relating to political ads on its platform. Whether or not these efforts are enough, is an entirely different story.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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