A Security Analysis of the Facebook Ad Library

Abstract

Actors engaged in election disinformation are using online advertising platforms to spread political messages. In response to this threat, online advertising networks have started making political advertising on their platforms more transparent in order to enable third parties to detect malicious advertisers. We present a set of methodologies and perform a security analysis of Facebook's U.S. Ad Library, which is their political advertising transparency product. Unfortunately, we find that there are several weaknesses that enable a malicious advertiser to avoid accurate disclosure of their political ads. We also propose a clustering-based method to detect advertisers engaged in undeclared coordinated activity. Our clustering method identified 16 clusters of likely inauthentic communities that spent a total of over four million dollars on political advertising. This supports the idea that transparency could be a promising tool for combating disinformation. Finally, based on our findings, we make recommendations for improving the security of advertising transparency on Facebook and other platforms.

Global Spaces for Local Politics: An Exploratory Analysis of Facebook Ads in Spanish Election Campaigns

“…On the other, it is important to stress the platform's structural constraints, which have been previously highlighted by Edelson et al (2020) and Silva et al (2020). Regarding the monetary and audience targeting variables, the data provided by the Facebook Ad Library are simplified and not very accurate, as they are based on numerical ranges.…”

“…The corpus, obtained directly from the Facebook Ad Library, was made up of 14,684 ads published by six Spanish national parties during the two election campaigns. As far as can be gathered from the literature, apart from the research conducted by Edelson et al (2020), this study is among the first to have explored this information source (see also Cano-Orón et al 2021).…”

Understanding the Complexity of Detecting Political Ads

“…Ribeiro et al [30] analysed ads send by the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections and found that ads were send to people less likely to report them. Edelson et al [9] presented a clustering-based method to discover advertisers engaging in a potentially undeclared coordinated activity and proposed recommendations for improving the security of political advertising transparency. Furthermore, Bolden et al [5] summarized problems with the Facebook Ad Library, such as the lack of clear policies and data systematicity.…”

Beyond Clicktivism: What Makes Digitally Native Activism Effective? An Exploration of the Sleeping Giants Movement

“…Advertisers have little control over ad distribution and are thus mostly unaware of the specific websites where their ads appear. Platforms provide few affordances to audit the targeting and allocation algorithms of this technology, and those few that are available have been found deficient and incomplete (Andreou et al, 2019; Edelson et al, 2020; Matias et al, 2021). Therefore, programmatic advertising involves a reputational risk when ads appear on sites that involve not only brand-misaligned content but also disinformation, hateful statements, or immoral content (Mostrous, 2017).…”