This is missing the ads from the company I work for. We do a lot of Facebook advertising. Is it US only?
Edit: The link is to political only ads, although this filtering is not exposed in the UI, and when searching for the company I work for I find similarly named companies that are definitely not political. When editing the URL back to "https://www.facebook.com/ads/library", and searching, it works, although the site then resets to political ads... but with more results showing.
It's there, but further down. The list goes Austria to United States, then Afghanistan to Zimbabwe... for some reason. Canada is in the second block. Again, for some reason.
I've personally never seen a public company have such a real time insight into the primary revenue driver of the company. In theory this should be the most effecient stock on the market. Even if this is only a portion of the overall revenue, I'm interested to see how this could affect the performance of their stock in the market.
I have tried this in the UK and it seems to be limited to political ads only - I was not able to find a major brand like O2 (mobile carrier) for example.
This whole thing seems like more harm than good and an example of Facebook (intentionally or not) having a larger political influence than a "social media" company should.
I think "limited to political ads only" adds to the initial problem of political ads in first place.
What even counts as a "political ad"?
Sure, there are obvious examples like "vote ___ for governor", but then is an advertisement for condoms a "political ad"? It's a politically charged topic, so... it depends.
> Keep in mind, keyword searches return only ads related to politics or issues of importance. You can try your search again and select from the Page results.
Cherry-picked examples of an incredibly complex system failing (when it succeeds 99% of the time) aren't particularly compelling arguments against the system.
I found it odd that the first thing I searched for returned dozens of different ads that were all flagged for being political when they clearly aren't.
“This ad ran without a disclaimer. After the ad started running, we determined that the ad was related to politics and issues of national importance and required the label. The ad was taken down.”
Seems like a pretty arbitrary rule set. I'd love to see some examples of ads that don't have anything related to any of those topics. It seems like it would be pretty easy to argue that any ad is related to at least one of those bullets
I'm curious, are they notified when their ads are taken down? Or does facebook do "shadowbanning" themselves? I'd expect them to do it when nation-state interests are involved, but I guess nothing stops them from taking in the money from the regular folk and lying about ad impressions when an ad goes against their interests.
From what my results indicate, they stop the ads from running. So you wouldn't see ads that were incorrectly labeled, you WOULDN'T see ads that should be running but were incorrectly flagged as needing a political affiliation label.
And from the looks of the Yoga ads, there are hundreds that have been flagged/paused as needing to disclose they are political (when they actually aren't.)
Anecdotally someone may have evidence of poor performance. Assigning a specific number to its statistical probability based on that anecdotal evidence is where the problem lies.
The flag is "Related to politics or issues of importance", not "national importance". Even then it could just be of importance in that targeted country.
Facebook is using this as a flag for sensitive content to viewers, for everything from Happy Holidays to Yoga, which has a philosophical and religious history beyond stretching-in-different-poses. For example, this watch ad with Santa Claus gets flagged the same way: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
I am not saying these are correct classifications, but if you managed a billion-person social network, then it makes sense to cater your ads to as many people's viewpoints as possible.
I am not mistaken. Go look, the first ad for Yoga, click on the info icon and you will see:
“This ad ran without a disclaimer. After the ad started running, we determined that the ad was related to politics and issues of national importance and required the label. The ad was taken down.”
This is the same for many other yoga ads.
Yoga studios aren’t political orgs not are the issues of national importance.
"National importance" meaning importance inside that nation that the ad is being displayed. Facebook lists the categories here, including health (which a classifier could put yoga under):
Interesting. I've heard the argument that yoga is part of India's soft power [1], though it's a little hard to believe that's why Facebook classified it as political or important.
I went to my FB - gotten two ads. Searched for them in this - for the first one:
- wasn't able to find it by title, url, company name, nothing, regardless if filtering by my home country, or country I'm at currently
- second one - the Economist, showed 12 results, with an option to Subscribe to each one of them; what does that mean? shouldn't I already be "subscribed" to at least one of those?
Blocked from Searching or Viewing the Ad Archive
You have been temporarily blocked from searching or viewing the Ad Archive due to too many requests. Please try again later.
Is it really an "archive" if you can't download the contents at a reasonable rate? (Eg: I wouldn't expect gigabit speeds, but if you're willing to go slow and steady a 500k/1meg a second that should be doable)
That would enforce actual transparency. We can't allow that to happen!
Here's how it works: You tells us who you are and what you're looking for, then we'll see what we can show you and what we can't.
This has been available for a while from all company's pages, but it's cool to see it in searchable format.
EDIT: Ah, only political ads are searchable, but all ads are findable by looking up a company page. Just like before, so there's not much actually new here.
Was there previously a way to do these searches without a company page, or without a Facebook account at all? If not, I would consider this a big change!
Quicksearch for Germany for some political parties:
SPD: 880 adds
FDP: 96 adds
Grüne: 3 adds
Die Linke: 2
AFD: 2 adds
CSU: 1 add
CDU: 0 adds (?!)
Obviously there's a lot of subpages (youth organisations, state organisations) as well but I found it interesting that only one party (or two if you want to count FDP) seems to actively use FB adds linked to their official pages. Will be interesting to poke around in this dataset.
Looking for something downloadable. The dropdown for weekly CSV-files only shows USA, India and UK. I'm not sure it's that useful because it only contains "Page Name", "Disclaimer", "Amount Spent", "Number of Ads in Library".
The actual adds would be much more interesting :)
Would be interesting to see how that changes for the European Parliament election. The offline advertising for that should pop up soon, and maybe at the same time the online ads will too.
It would really neat if they also included all the targeting options that were used on the ads as well. Currently you can gather that by seeing age, gender, and location but specific groups, etc that were used aren't available.
There's no way in hell that foreign countries waited until 2016 to test out online propaganda campaigns. Anyone in Congress with half a brain would think to check previous elections for similar evidence of 'meddling'. It's far more likely that online election meddling dates back to MySpace and AOL or earlier.
I wish they would just launch a friggin paid option. No ads, no data collection (for selling, I understand they need some to literally make the site function). I happily pay youtube for an adfree experience and wouldn't balk at doing the same for facebook.
Your data is the most valuable thing you have to offer and you give it up for free. Why would they install a barrier to people giving away the the most monetized asset in their business sector?
Why would they let you avoid seeing ads? A user who doesn’t look at ads to drive the value of user data is worse than a non-user; at least a non-user doesn’t cost them any overhead.
It would only be a matter of time before they started showing ads to paying users too. Pay for a magazine subscription? Magazine is filled with ads anyway. Pay for a cable tv subscription? Filled with ads anyway. Pay for HBO? Get shameless product placement (they claim they don't take money for it, but that doesn't change the substance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuIJVLrIAZQ) Pay for netflix? More product placement. Pay to see a movie? Ads before the movie, product placement throughout. Pay for Hulu? More like paying for ads.
Yes, but you are purchasing the magazine, movie, or service. If you are paying Facebook specifically to remove ads from an otherwise free product, it's much harder to justify injecting ads anyways.
And if for whatever reason they do, you can just stop paying them.
Title is misleading. Only the ads related to politics or "national importance". Many of us are dead tired of that subject by now. I had my hopes up that there would be some kind of new transparency shift toward advertising in general but this isn't it.
Now we have the commoditization of ad copy and ad experiments. It seems like it will now be fairly easy to piece together another company's Facebook marketing and ad campaigns.
It looks like the keyword search is only for political/national importance but you can still go to a company's page and see all ads posted by that page: http://zakis.cool/tvT36o
Edit: The link is to political only ads, although this filtering is not exposed in the UI, and when searching for the company I work for I find similarly named companies that are definitely not political. When editing the URL back to "https://www.facebook.com/ads/library", and searching, it works, although the site then resets to political ads... but with more results showing.
It seems there are a lot of bugs with this.