Facebook launched a new searchable Ad Library Friday. The library shows all actives ads on any topics, and inactive political or issue-focussed adverts.
Facebook’s Transparency Drive
The move is in a bid to increase transparency, after the social network was heavily criticised for how adverts on the site were used in recent elections. The new Ad Library shows a variety of key information about an advert (via TechCrunch):
- Page creation dates
- Mergers with other Pages
- Page name changes
- Where a Page is managed from
The information can be found via the Page Transparency tab on all pages. It also provides the option to report an advert for policy violations.
The new Ad Library is not the only transparency step Facebook has taken. It introduced political ad labelling, previously only live in the UK, to the whole of the European Union (there are EU elections coming up in May). Furthermore, it expanded the programmatic access researchers and developers have to its Ad Library API. That was previously in a closed beta, but anyone with a Facebook developer account can now access it via an Identity Confirmation process.