On Facebook’s latest ad transparency and research partnership announcements

Facebook has made further updates to its plans for ad transparency. It includes much of what we’ve been calling for over the last year since we founded Who Targets Me.

Last September and October, in a couple of posts, we argued that ‘ad transparency’ should mean users can see (we’ve marked what Facebook has committed to so far in bold):

1. The full targeting of a political ad, as specified by the advertiser and the goal they have selected for it
2. How much the advertiser has budgeted to spend on it
3. The current and predicted reach of the ad
4. When ad was placed, and the predicted date the budget will be exhausted
5. Data about the locations the ad has been viewed, ideally on a map
6. The proportion of paid vs. non-paid interactions on the ad post
7. All alternative versions of the ad running now or in the past (e.g. A/B tests, or duplications with revisions)
8. Ads in perpetuity — not just those that are currently running — and include deleted posts in the archive

There are still some outstanding differences, but the announcement is progress, for sure. (Note that 6. is important on a social media platform where ads are designed to be shared. You shouldn’t have to perform mathematical gymnastics to work it out).

Facebook has also provided more detail about its proposed searchable database of political ads. We’ve had one of these for the last ten months or so, populated with data provided by everyone who has installed Who Targets Me (thank you!). We’ve shared this information with journalists and researchers and they’ve used it to understand how ads are being used for political ends and explain it to their readers.

Here’s a few random examples from the database:

• Here’s an ad in favour of Brexit.
• Here’s one trying to stop it.
• Here’s one for this weekend’s Hungarian election.
• Here’s an ad for the NRA.
• Here’s a pro-Trump ad from Don Blankenship.
• And here’s one calling for him to be impeached.
• Here’s an ad from the Turkish equivalent of Russia Today (targeted to reach people in Germany, aged between 18–45, who are interested in ‘newspapers’).
• Finally, here’s what tref.ie are doing to make the forthcoming referendum in Ireland more transparent.

Interesting stuff, isn’t it?

The infinite advantage Facebook has over us is they have all of the data. Their ad database should prove to be a fascinating resource for researchers, journalists and voters. But it needs to be user-friendly. What are we to do with 6 million different Donald Trump for President ads if they’re presented as an ever scrolling list?

In the next week or so, in the spirit of making things user friendly, we’re going to add some functionality for the Who Targets Me extension so you can see a breakdown of the political ads you’ve been targeted with. This — being able to refer to the ads you’ve seen, and the reasons you’ve been targeted — is still missing from Facebook’s plans.

It’s quite simple. This is what it’ll look like (for UK users, but coming soon for some other countries too):

As well as seeing the breakdown of who’s targeting you, you’ll be able to click a bar and see all ads you’ve seen from that advertiser, along with links to them and the reason you saw the ad.

We think Facebook should introduce something like this too. One of the things the stories of recent weeks have made clear is that the tools users have at their disposal to explain why they’re seeing certain things are inadequate. Facebook can provide much more useful information for voters, particularly around elections, and if we can make it, they can too.

Another announcement is that Facebook will start to verify political advertisers. Users will be able to report ads that appear to slip through the net (another thing we’ve called for). We’ve not yet studied the detail of the verification process, but it would be good for the criteria used to be transparent and for advertisers who fail the verification process to be shared with other ad platforms in some way. This points to one of the challenges of Facebook appointing itself to police this — there are other places that need policing too. Perhaps verification would be better performed by an empowered regulator?

The very latest announcement, which came yesterday, is of a series of partnerships with foundations who will fund independent research about the impact of the platform on democracy. This is very welcome. Post Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, there was justified concern in the research community that data would be even harder to get hold of. It was already pretty hard — as far as we’re aware, Who Targets Me is one of the only sources of data in the world about political social media advertising.

There are lots of interesting questions for future research projects to investigate (and they’ll have all of Facebook to look at, we assume, whereas our interest is in targeted ads). The most important question for us is this — do the ads really work? There’s little research, yet hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on them each year to win votes with them. How much does the company, the largest media channel ever created, matter to democracy? Facebook will be hoping for a three bears answer — not too little, not too much, but just the right amount.

Most of Facebook’s new measures will appear in ‘the next few months’. Time will tell if they’re effective.

But Facebook’s announcements aren’t quite comprehensive — there are still some important gaps in their thinking:

1. Regulators need to be brought into research and transparency discussions. Dollar for dollar, social media ads buy you many times the reach and targeting accuracy of traditional forms of media. Regulators are often very underpowered, but they are the arbiters of the rules of our elections. Those rules are built around print, broadcast and TV, not personal data and massively scalable digital advertising. The goal should be to give them the tools detect bad things happening (broken rules, disinformation, foreign influence efforts) before or as they’re happening so they can respond appropriately to them. Put simply, Facebook’s ‘election integrity’ initiatives need to do as much as possible to involve the people whose job it is to look after elections, not just Facebook. The company has missed too many bad things to be trusted to do it alone.
2. Facebook needs to create clear guidance on how it works with political advertisers. This isn’t something they’ve talked about much. Are they going to continue to directly help campaigns if they’re spending lots of money? If so, how?
3. Facebook needs to do a lot more internationally. We’ve been contacted by too many organisations in too many countries, worried that the company isn’t present, let alone thinking hard about the specific concerns they have about damage to their politics. This means more hires with an understanding of how campaigns are fought and won and the specific political context of the country in question. This means partnerships with foundations outside the US. This means active engagement and collaboration with policy-makers in many countries, not the adversarial approach that has led to the company getting an invited on a parliamentary committee world tour.
4. Facebook should think hard about how it presents politics to us, its users. A newspaper has a politics section (that you can skip if you choose to). Political TV programmes are stacked up on a Sunday morning (you can stay in bed). Ads show when the programmes aren’t on (time for a cup of tea). On Facebook, politics (and news) can come from anywhere, at any time, as an ad, a post from a candidate, an opinion of a friend, a shared meme, a video, a picture, some text. It makes for a very different experience of consumption and makes Facebook’s design one of the key areas for future research.

Overall though, we should remember that Facebook shouldn’t work on these problems alone. The moves it’s making suggest a newfound desire for openness and collaboration, and if it’s prepared to listen and adapt over the long term, Facebook (and social media as a whole) may be able find a balanced place in our political lives.

But if it continues on the path it’s been on, it will be forced to change. As big and powerful as the company appears, it’s weak compared to the states (and their citizens) who ultimately decide how it operates. If they want it to act differently, Facebook will have to comply or withdraw.