
Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads - bluetidepro
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US
======
danpalmer
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"](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.

~~~
envy2
You have to change the country in the top right.

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

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

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

[https://i.imgur.com/pqwQzZg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/pqwQzZg.jpg)

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

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

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swalsh
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.

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

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

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Nextgrid
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.

~~~
melvinram
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.

~~~
dustindiamond
What are issues of importance?

What are not issues of importance?

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ada1981
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...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&q=Yoga)

~~~
dymk
Cherry-picked examples of an incredibly complex system failing (when it
succeeds 99% of the time) aren't particularly compelling arguments against the
system.

~~~
ada1981
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.

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

~~~
ada1981
“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.”

~~~
bduerst
>issues of national importance

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

[https://www.facebook.com/business/help/214754279118974?helpr...](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/214754279118974?helpref=faq_content)

~~~
okmokmz
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

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eithed
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?

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

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

~~~
gkcgautam
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.

~~~
dontbenebby
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)

~~~
mateo1
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.

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tumetab1
Soo.. what ads are related to penises

[https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&q=penis)

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

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cm2012
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.

~~~
glitcher
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!

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kriro
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 :)

~~~
hobofan
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.

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SnowingXIV
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.

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beenBoutIT
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.

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nautical
[https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-
landing-page&country=IN) Its interesting to see how much political parties are
spending on Facebook Ads.

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coderintherye
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...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?view_all_page_id=1797590283821718&country=US)

~~~
whatever_dude
Wow this is a library of conspiracy theory ads.

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

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krisroadruck
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.

~~~
darkpuma
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](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.

~~~
i_cant_speel
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.

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

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rja907
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...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Donald%20J.%20Trump&view_all_page_id=153080620724)

~~~
bacondude3
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?

~~~
ranie93
[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/18/beto-orourke-support-from-
bi...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/18/beto-orourke-support-from-big-tech-
could-be-blessing-curse-in-2020.html)

[https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvy58m/beto-orourke-
tops...](https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvy58m/beto-orourke-tops-the-
field-in-first-day-fund-raising-but-hes-being-vague-about-it)

[https://www.thoughtco.com/bundling-political-
contributions-l...](https://www.thoughtco.com/bundling-political-
contributions-legal-and-illegal-3367621)

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

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

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

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Nuzzerino
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.

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

~~~
mic47
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...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Target&view_all_page_id=8103318119)

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

~~~
pmart123
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.

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

