It said on Monday that Reuters- Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc will share more data on targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social-issue ads in its public ad database.
Meta said it would include detailed targeting information for 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 analyzing 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.
In the past few years, the social media giant has faced pressure to provide transparency around targeted advertising on its platforms, particularly around elections. In 2018, it launched a public ads library, but some researchers criticized it for glitches and lack of detailed targeting data.
Meta said the ads library will display a summary of information for social issue, electoral or political ads run by a page.
The Ad Library could show that a Page ran 2,000 ads about social issues, elections or politics over the last 30 days, and that 40% of their ads were targeted to people living in Pennsylvania or people who are interested in politics, Meta said in a blog post.
Meta said that additional information will be added to the Ad Library in July. 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 programs with external researchers as part of its transparency efforts. Last year, it said that 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 accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on its platform because of user privacy concerns.