With just five months until election day, Facebook and other social media platforms are being swarmed by political advertising, with many of us left wondering who is behind the messaging and how they are being targeted by each campaign.

Since the 2018 cycle, Facebook has taken welcome steps toward transparency by voluntarily disclosing political ad content and data through its online Ad Library. But the library is not very user-friendly and doesn’t capture all of the ads being aired.
 
This week, USA Today published an op-ed I penned with Laura Edelson, a cybersecurity researcher at New York University, about tracking digital ad spending and our joint work to expose the unaddressed loopholes in voluntary disclosure systems that allow various players to influence our elections.
 
To strengthen democracy, we need to stay vigilant and offer solutions that divulge the groups behind online political ads and avoid a repeat of the 2016 election where manipulative actors spread disinformation on Facebook to influence both liberal and conservative audiences, without any accountability.
 
We can’t wait for Facebook to tackle these problems in earnest. To address the need, in partnership with Wesleyan Media Project, OpenSecrets has launched a new database with data profiling Facebook and Google ​ads by presidential campaigns and groups supporting them.
 
We are working to add similar data for congressional campaigns, and more new tools for tracking online political ad data — but we need your support to do so. Please help us expand this critical tool for the pivotal months to come.