Thanks for this great summary! When I first started looking at Ad Libraries I found them so confusing, and this guide would've been immensely helpful :)
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 : https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07527
There isn't a dedicated ad library for YouTube. But the good news is that the Google ad library includes video ads that appeared on YouTube. You can set the Format menu to Video. You'll see that some video ads are be hosted on YouTube, which means they likely appeared there. Hope that helps!
Do you have a recommendation for archiving ad transparency details off-platform, but in a way that makes accusations of manipulation (which can come with screenshots) difficult, if not impossible? Ads that are not specifically marked as issue ads, and/or that do not fall under EU archival mandates, get dropped when they stop running, and even some archived ads lose details when their host account/page is terminated.
Thanks for this great summary! When I first started looking at Ad Libraries I found them so confusing, and this guide would've been immensely helpful :)
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 : https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07527
Press Release: https://spia.princeton.edu/news/despite-progress-researchers-find-more-potential-discrimination-facebook-ads
Lawsuit: Meta vs Real Women in Trucking https://prf-law.com/s/Real-Women-in-Trucking-Meta-Charge.pdf
Thanks for reading and for sharing these resources!
Thanks for the great material! Shared it with my colleagues)
But I have a question - why is there still no ad library for YouTube? Or did I miss something?
There isn't a dedicated ad library for YouTube. But the good news is that the Google ad library includes video ads that appeared on YouTube. You can set the Format menu to Video. You'll see that some video ads are be hosted on YouTube, which means they likely appeared there. Hope that helps!
Do you have a recommendation for archiving ad transparency details off-platform, but in a way that makes accusations of manipulation (which can come with screenshots) difficult, if not impossible? Ads that are not specifically marked as issue ads, and/or that do not fall under EU archival mandates, get dropped when they stop running, and even some archived ads lose details when their host account/page is terminated.
As for "There are now at least 13 digital ad libraries": the full and current list is here:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/list-designated-vlops-and-vloses
It does not link straight to the actual online ad libraries though.
Thanks for that link! Yes, it just shows the platforms that have received the DSA designation.