Help WIRED Track How Political Ads Target You on Facebook | WIRED: Crucially, the tool won’t collect your personal information—not your Facebook ID or identifiers, not your profile information or contacts, not what you do on the platform. It just copies the ad, the targeting information Facebook provides with it (which you can also view by clicking the top right corner of a sponsored post and selecting "Why am I seeing this?"), and some other metadata like the time and date the ad was seen. It won’t identify which individual users see a particular ad, either. You can read more about how the extension works here, and ProPublica has also put the source code up on GitHub for anyone who wants to check it out.
Since last year, Facebook launched its own political ad archive, but it currently doesn't include the more detailed targeting information. Reporters are also finding clearly political ads that Facebook’s algorithms don’t catch. ProPublica’s tool is still a valuable, independent resource.
If you're a Facebook user, we hope you’ll consider downloading the extension and contributing to the project. Who knows—you might find something interesting in the Political Ad Collector, too.
Since last year, Facebook launched its own political ad archive, but it currently doesn't include the more detailed targeting information. Reporters are also finding clearly political ads that Facebook’s algorithms don’t catch. ProPublica’s tool is still a valuable, independent resource.
If you're a Facebook user, we hope you’ll consider downloading the extension and contributing to the project. Who knows—you might find something interesting in the Political Ad Collector, too.