Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads | Hacker News Reader

Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads

facebook.com

190 pointsbluetidepro89 comments

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 seems there are a lot of bugs with this.

> political only ads

Already a designation that is not cognizable in the first place.

I find it interesting that this tool exists for the Facebook platform and not Instagram. Instagram has a meaningful amount of FB’s ad spend.

I found ads on the website that I saw on Instagram, I believe both Instagram and FB ads are on the website.

an other possibility is that it was an ad submitted on both platforms, and only the one on FB showed up on that website.

You have to change the country in the top right.

This did not work. It appears to return the same results as when set to the US. It is saving the country preference though.

I managed to get it to work after manually editing the URLs, although clicking the wrong thing or refreshing the page would reset this.

Do you know why Canada is not present ?

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.

The beauty of UX. Or lack of it.

Things like this always remind me of this awesome talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KVyFio8gw4

The example starting at 9:45 especially relates.

FYI, there is a neat trick for deep linking directly to timestamps on youtube, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KVyFio8gw4&t=9m45s

or right click on the video and "Copy video URL at current time"

Neat. You can use this find out what Lyft pays drivers as a signup bonus in different cities.

https://i.imgur.com/pqwQzZg.jpg

It must be possible to do a/b tests on FB?

Maybe they don't show the variations but just a random one?

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.

This doesn't tell me how much a company is paying for their entire ad campaigns, ignoring political ads.

True, it is only political ads. But 500 million dollars is not small potatoes.

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.

It says that right on the page:

> 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.

What are issues of importance?

What are not issues of importance?

Apparently yoga studios running ads are often blocked for being "political" or of "national importance".

Oh dear, facebook, oh dear.

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

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.

The flag is "Related to politics or issues of importance", meaning it's a broad classifier for sensitive issues, not just political ones.

“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.”

>issues of national importance

Basically anything that hits this list and is targeting within those nations:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/214754279118974?helpr...

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.

Hmh.. when i search YOGA I get this >>

"Search results display ads with text that matched your keyword search term. Only ads related to politics or issues of importance are included."

Not sure why it only shows ads related to politics (none of the ads shown are).

And, after searching 2x I was temp banned from using the tool.

At Facebook scale, 1% would potentially mean about 15 millions of daily users are presented misclassified ads.

Does it succeed 99% of the time?

It's close to it. I can't remember ever seeing an ad in my newsfeed that was incorrectly labeled with a political affiliation disclaimer. Have you?

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.)

Your anecdotal experience is completely irrelevant to the statement that you made.

Thank you, captain obvious, and it's actually not. If the system was doing poorly, we'd be able to directly observe it.

Do you have evidence that their political ad detection does poorly?

I don't have any evidence, because I don't use Facebook. Furthermore, I never made any claims to provide evidence for.

Do you have evidence or source for the claim you made? Or are you just here to call people silly names and pass anecdotes off as fact?

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.

That's not how statistics, or debate, works

>when it succeeds 99% of the time

source?

Where did you get your two nines number from?

You're misreading it.

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 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):

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/214754279118974?helpr...

Interesting and weird.

🇺🇸

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.

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2015-01-25/yog...

Most likely these are unsophisticated advertisers who mis-labelled their own ads?

Most likely a bad algorithm misclassifying yoga ads as policial speech and requiring a disclaimer of who is paying for the ad.

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?

I was blocked by Facebook after 2 searches. So much for transparency.

Out of curiosity do you use a VPN? I get issues like this a lot when browsing via VPN

Was there any feedback on the reason or mechanism for blocking?

I got blocked too. Got the following message:

  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.

Soo.. what ads are related to penises

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

I'm amazed by the quantity of paid trash in Facebook.

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.

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-... Its interesting to see how much political parties are spending on Facebook Ads.

This is really interesting, can see ads by anti-vaxxers, for instance this one runs a lot of them https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?view_all_page_id=17975...

Wow this is a library of conspiracy theory ads.

Surprised I didn't see a chemtrail one in there.

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.

How much would you be willing to pay? $10/mo, $50/mo ?

They see more potential in keeping it free and selling you then trying to collect money from you.

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.

That is why I got rid of my tv antenna and pay for cable television, so I don’t see any ads.

People with disposable income to spend on web subscriptions are exactly who all the advertisers want to advertise to!

They have a paid option. Advertisers pay them to show you ads and get your data.

You are not a customer. You are the product. Produce doesn't get to chose how and where it is displayed.

This!

Trump has spent around $11M on ads just on Facebook. If you go into the ad details you'll see how he targets different genders, age groups according to states: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

I think it's even more interesting to see the Democrat side:

  * O'Rourke $8.4M
  * Harris $1.6M
  * Warren $1.3M
  * Booker $800K
  * Sanders $685K
  * Klobuchar $365K
  * Yang $120K
  * Buttigieg $10.5K

Why is everybody else spending so much less than O'Rourke? Does his campaign actually have that much more money compared to the other campaigns?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/18/beto-orourke-support-from-bi...

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvy58m/beto-orourke-tops...

https://www.thoughtco.com/bundling-political-contributions-l...

O'Rourke just finished a huge campaign for the Senate in November, I assume it's that and not his just-launched presidential bid.

(Disclaimer - I find the site hard to use and maybe it's obvious to someone else that it's not correct)

This is PR smoke, they need to make the whole dataset publicly available and downloadable for it to be useful

To its credit, Twitter has been doing this for some time now.

It's too late, no one cares, right?

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.

The page says "all active ads" more than once. Perhaps the mention of political ads is just for emphasis?

Just type Target or other company into the search field and you'll see that it looks like all ads: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

I guess you are right and the political ads are mentioned for emphasis.

EDIT: Apparently there's a toggle button to switch between the two result sets on Target's page.

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.

Maybe this sort of sharing will promote innovation in advertising? :-)

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

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