Meta said it would also include detailed targeting
information for these individual ads in its "Facebook Open Research and
Transparency" database used by academic researchers, in an expansion of a
pilot launched last year.
"Instead of analysing how an ad was delivered by
Facebook, it's really going and looking at an advertiser strategy for what they
were trying to do," said Jeff King, Meta's vice president of business
integrity, in a phone interview.
The social media giant has faced pressure in recent years to
provide transparency around targeted advertising on its platforms, particularly
around elections. In 2018, it launched a public ad library, though some
researchers criticised it for glitches and a lack of detailed targeting data.
Meta said the ad library will soon show a summary of
targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads run by a
page.
"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,'" Meta
said in a blog post.
Meta said the additional information in the ad library will
be added in July. It said the data for vetted researchers will be available at
the end of May and will show information since August 2020.
The company has run various programmes with external
researchers as part of its transparency efforts. Last year, it said a technical
error meant flawed data had been provided to academics in its "Social
Science One" project.
In 2021, the company said it had disabled the accounts of a
group of New York University researchers studying political ads on its platform
because of user privacy concerns. © Reuters