Thanks to the the Cambridge Analytics scandal, Meta decided to implement a range of data protection measures in order to limit access access to people’s personal data and insight. Meta also decided to be transparent on how its systems are being used by a number of groups regarding target messaging.
Thanks to to Meta’s Ad Library, the company was able to keep these two conflicting approaches balanced, which let anybody look at any ad that was being run by any Facebook Page in the recent past.
To continue the trend, Meta will add to that insight by including information on how Pages are using social issue, electoral or political ads.
Meta explains:
“At the end of this month, detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads will be made available to vetted academic researchers through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment […] Coming in July, our publicly available Ad Library will also include a summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads run after launch. This update will include data on the total number of social issue, electoral and political ads a Page ran using each type of targeting (such as location, demographics and interests) and the percentage of social issue, electoral and political ad spend used to target those options.”
Source – Social Media Today