Moreover, Google, Facebook, and Twitter separately rolled out in mid-2018
versions of the ad archive proposal from Klobuchar and Warner’s legislation.
Facebook created a searchable library for all political ads purchased after
May 2018 and has stated that all ads will stay online for at least seven
years.19 Users can search by keywords and select ads from speciﬁc sponsors to
see rough approximations of impressions (ad views) by gender, age, and state.
(We will further discuss the Facebook library and its limitations in the
“Measuring Digital Spending” section.) Twitter, which stopped selling
political ads in late 2019, and Google allow users to see just election-related
ads (and not public policy-focused ads), but like Facebook they also show some
statistics on audience demographics. These are important ﬁrst steps in providing
citizens, journalists, and scholars access to a wide range of data on digital
advertising, but initial reviews of the libraries pointed to a host of limitations
Social_Media_and_Democracy