all political “issue ads” (Goldman and Himel 2018). Beginning in November
2017, a feature called “view ads” was tested in Canada, where users could
navigate the dropdown menu on a page to see all of the ads that it was currently
running (Goldman 2017). This was expanded to the United States and Brazil in
the spring of 2018 and, in June 2018, allowed users to view ads run by a page
across platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger). In May 2018,
Facebook launched a public political ad archive of all political ads being run;
and, in August 2018, Facebook provided a political ad API that would allow
researchers and journalists to access this archive (see Leathern 2018a, 2018b).
Other major platform companies simultaneously rolled out similar initiatives.
In October 2017, Twitter announced a number of
future advertising
transparency efforts, including a “Transparency Center,” which launched in
Social_Media_and_Democracy