Facebook's New Ad Library Allows You to Get The 411 on All Ads, Not Just Political Ones
The Ad Library provides advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running from across Facebook Products.
In an effort to make good on CEO, Mark Zuckerberg's promise to increase transparency at the world's largest Social Media company, Facebook has rolled out its Ad Library tool. The social media giant is under intense scrutiny from governments around the world for what is perceived by many as a profit-driven hands-off approach to how Facebook moderates content shared on its websites, both by users and Advertisers.
As part of his testimony in front of a congressional oversight committee, Zuckerberg promised swift action. The company has since taken several measures to restrict what kinds of content can be shared on its platforms, tightened security and privacy, and has since taken broader steps to share with the general public, as much as possible, which advertisers are running which ads.
Facebook's Ad Library tool is yet another step to help the firm deal with rogue advertisers, specifically, foreign actors and those who share content political content or ads that might impact issues of national interest.
What is Facebook Ad Library?
According to the company, "The Ad Library provides advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running from across Facebook Products. Anyone can explore the Library, with or without a Facebook account.
You can access all active ads, even ones that may not have been shown to you because you weren't part of an advertiser's intended audience".
An update to a previous initiative, the new and improved Ad data depository will allow users to easily access data relevant to any marketing campaign being run by all kinds of organizations on the Facebook ecosystem.
Users will be able to view the length of ads, budgets, entities running the ads, target audience for the ads, and many more.
See data for all ads related to politics or issues of national importance
The Library contains data on every active and inactive ad related to politics or issues of national importance that's run since May 2018. We'll keep each of these ads in the Library for seven years.
Explore and download the Ad Library Report
We compile a weekly snapshot of data for ads related to politics or issues of national importance in the Ad Library Report. Browse, filter and download ad data.