Photo: anyaberkut/iStock(MIDDLETOWN, CT) December 9, 2021 – Given the rapid recent growth in spending on political advertising online (at least 25 percent of 2020 presidential spending) and the challenges that the current ad libraries pose for research and for accountability in elections, the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP) proposes a new universal transparency standard for platforms that sell digital ads and meet certain eligibility thresholds.A new WMP paper, jointly authored with researchers at NYU and Mozilla and released today, outlines a universal transparency standard that would require these platforms to report advertising by sponsor to a centralized repository maintained by a…

WMP Submits Comments to Federal Election Commission about Enhanced Reporting of Campaign Spending The FEC is considering a new rule on how campaign committees report spending by contractors and consultants. WMP co-director Michael Franz submitted comments in support of the new regulation, arguing that existing rules make it hard to track ad spending on digital platforms. His full set of comments are linked here. The summary of the report is below: “This analysis compares FEC expenditures by U.S. House candidates in the 2019-2020 cycle with Facebook Ad Library totals for candidates between January 2019 and Election Day 2020. We use…

Political ad campaigns on Facebook are not necessarily comparable to political ad campaigns on television, argues a newly-published article from the Wesleyan Media Project’s co-directors.  In a manuscript titled, “The Influence of Goals and Timing: How Campaigns Deploy Ads on Facebook,” which appears in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Travis Ridout, Erika Franklin Fowler and Michael Franz suggest that political ads on Facebook pursue a variety of goals—and the goals pursued depend on the timing of the campaign. The research examines Facebook ads placed by 24 different candidates running for U.S. Senate in 2018.  The ads were tracked…