What To Know About The “Ad Observatory”
It’s election season. You know it. We know it. But the candidates definitely know it, as your no-doubt very full email and text message inboxes show. Candidates have recently ramped up their advertising and outreach to a fever pitch as the election fast approaches on Tuesday, November 8th. Now, journalists are rejoicing because there is a brand new way to check political ad-spending.
Behold the Ad Observatory, a free tool by NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy. NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering designed the interface, which allows for keyword searches across free data available from the Meta Ad Library, a living archive of every advertisement running across Meta properties. The interface also automatically combines the data with available election information, such as which candidate is spending, where, for how much, etc. It creates an easy-to-understand graph that’s perfect for tracking spending trends over time.
“We don’t clean [the data] so much as add layers of analysis on top of it. Those topics — you cannot find that on Facebook. We also have classifications of the ads: buy versus persuade versus connect. That’s not something Facebook provides; we add that value,” said Nancy Watzman, a strategic advisor for NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy. “What you can find on the Meta Ad Library is the trees, and we’re showing you the whole forest on [the Ad Observatory]. If you want to go back and find a particular tree, the Ad Library is very useful.”
One pitfall of the tool is that it trusts Meta’s classification of what is and is not a political advertisement, but the data is still relatively useful for tracking. The data itself is meant to be a supplement to ongoing larger stories in politics rather than a direct tracker for any cause or correlation: “Spending is just one metric,” Watzman said. “It is true that overall, historically, the biggest spender usually wins in a race. But, that’s not just spending on Facebook, and there’s always exceptions to that rule.”
Furthermore, the tool could offer some good retrospective supplemental data after the midterm elections are over. As the midterms get closer, political ad spending ratchets up, according to Watzman. “It's going to be hard to track. It's going to be hard to figure out what's going on. It's just going to be an onslaught,” she said. “It's a very crucial election in the U.S., and a lot of people have a lot at stake. We need journalists watching.” Once the results are in, comparing the wins/voting habits of each state to the amount of money candidates poured into their spending on Meta could reveal something about the election we didn’t know before.
NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy has encouraged people who would like to contribute to the tool or who have suggestions for improving it to contact them directly. “After we're all done with this election, we're going to be figuring out what our next projects are. So we're always open to talking,” she said. If this tool proves valuable, it’s exciting to see what it can do in upcoming elections.
