No.ad Library
Lorin Searing
I am trying to get all ads from different political pages on Facebook using the Radlibrary package in R -- which I have done a hundred times before with no problem at all. Now I experience that some ads are not returned -- there`s no system in which ads are not returned: for one party it is just a few ads in april 2022, for another it's all ads after 1/1/2021 -- but the thing in common is that I get some of the ads.
Also, I know the ads are available since they are 1) displayed both in the browser version of the Ad Library but also if I download them as a .csv file from facebook.com/ads/library and 2) I have managed to get the ads that now are missing in a previous pull a couple of months ago
Digital advertising is a half a trillion dollar a year industry and a core element of global marketing and election campaigns. Digital ads are also commonly used in influence operations, scams and cybercrime.
An ad library is a digital repository of recent and/or archived ads that have appeared on a given platform. Meta launched the first digital ad library in 2018. There are now at least 13 digital ad libraries.
The bad news is that most of the new ad libraries do the bare minimum required by the DSA (or even less). They share data about current and recent ads shown to people in the EU/EEU, but many do not have data for other countries.
Some platforms, such as Meta and Google, require advertisers to go through a special registration process if they want to run political/social issue ads. Such ads are archived for a longer period of time (often 7 years), show additional targeting information, and disclose info about who paid for the ad.
For non-political/issues ads, most libraries let you see ads that have run in the past year. Meta, however, only shows ads that are currently active. So when a campaign stops running, the ads disappear from the library.
This works for any beat or topic. I encourage all reporters and investigators to integrate ad libraries into their workflow. Any person, company, entity could run ads or be the subject of them. Just as you check to see if a person has registered a company or domains, you should see of they run, or are the subject of, digital ads. The same is true for issues, topics and beats: they may be the focus of interesting/newsworthy ads.
As noted above, a first step is to create a list of keywords to use in ad library searches. I suggest brainstorming keywords in the below categories to kickstart the process of coming up with search strings.
A final option to note is that Meta and Google offer the ability to conduct detailed searches and analysis of election/issues ads and advertisers. The Meta Spending Report and Google political ad section are worth exploring.
I wanted to plug in our recent research from Princeton University and the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), that could be helpful to your readers as an example of the impact Ad libraries could have and the type of research questions that could be answered using Ad library data and some web scraping knowledge. There was also a concurrent lawsuit submitted. I'm linking both below:
FAccT Paper: Nagaraj Rao, Varun, and Aleksandra Korolova. "Discrimination through Image Selection by Job Advertisers on Facebook." Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2023 :
Yet, in my experience, ads are rarely mentioned or taught in OSINT and digital investigative courses. I believe they\u2019re one of the least investigated and most poorly understood aspects of the digital economy. I\u2019ve been trying to change that by giving ad investigation workshops and by drawing attention to tools and techniques in this newsletter. I previously listed free digital ad tools and described a reporting methodology I used while investigating Google\u2019s ad business.
The growth is thanks largely to the EU Digital Services Act, which came into effect earlier this year. It requires digital services designated as \u201CVery Large Online Platforms and Search Engines\u201D to create an ad library. It\u2019s why we now have ad libraries for Apple\u2019s App Store, Bing and sites like Booking.com. That\u2019s the good news.
An overall source of frustration is that ad libraries are inconsistent and incomplete. Features in one platform\u2019s ad library won\u2019t necessarily be available in another; or ads that meet your search criteria will fail to appear in your results, among other issues. More on that below.
The problems with ad libraries are outlined in a recent Mozilla report, \u201CFull Disclosure: Stress testing tech platforms\u2019 ad repositories.\u201D They tested 12 ad libraries (all of the above except Amazon) and found that:
none is a fully-functional ad repository and none will provide researchers and civil society groups with the tools and data they need to effectively monitor the impact of VLOs advertisements on Europe\u2019s upcoming elections.
The situation is worse for non-EU/EEA countries. Only Meta, Google and LinkedIn offer access to ads that have run in a wide range of countries. It\u2019s difficult to keep track of the differences between libraries, so I maintain a chart that breaks down some of the key features. (I do my best to keep it up to date.)
Ad libraries are a welcome form of platform transparency. But they\u2019re incomplete and inconsistent. Don\u2019t assume they contain every ad on a given platform, or that a platform is making every political advertiser register. Lots of things slip through the cracks. But that\u2019s an opportunity for investigation and accountability.
If any of your applications use the Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) for authentication and authorization capabilities, it's time to migrate them to the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL).
Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) has been deprecated. While existing apps that use ADAL will continue to work, Microsoft will no longer release security fixes on ADAL. Use the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) to avoid putting your app's security at risk.
If you've developed apps using the Azure AD (v1.0) endpoint, you're likely using ADAL. Since Microsoft identity platform (v2.0) endpoint has changed significantly, the new library (MSAL) was entirely built for the new endpoint.
MSAL is designed to enable a secure solution without developers having to worry about the implementation details. It simplifies and manages acquiring, managing, caching, and refreshing tokens, and uses best practices for resilience. We recommend you use MSAL to increase the resilience of authentication and authorization in client applications that you develop.
You can use MSAL.NET, MSAL Java, MSAL.js, and MSAL Python to get tokens from Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2019 or later. Earlier versions of AD FS, including AD FS 2016, are unsupported by MSAL.
The audit, published by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and the Finnish disinformation research company CheckFirst, found significant shortcomings in the ad libraries of Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn, as well as major failings in the ad libraries of Alphabet and X (formerly Twitter).
X, most notably, has no web interface. The ad library only provides slow-loading CSV files that create a huge amount of friction for any journalist trying to track or report on ads circulating on the platform at any scale. One CSV file often takes between five to ten minutes to load. Most basic ad library searches on other platforms take just seconds.
For YouTube, researchers could find 100% of the ads they identified in the library. But for Google Search that number dropped down to 67%, meaning a significant portion of ads were missing altogether.
For example, Meta now has searchable historical data, going back six years, and filtering options to refine and narrow searches. The platforms still received significant knocks on performance. On Facebook, the researchers could only find 65% of the ads they identified in the library, showing again that ads were slipping through the cracks.
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