Meta’s Ad Library is free to use, and provides useful insights into how politicians and their campaigns are advertising on social media platforms.
Ted Cruz campaign using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users
Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters
Auditing Political Exposure Bias: Algorithmic Amplification on Twitter/X During the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: What political content are users exposed to beyond their established networks, and what implications does this have for democratic discourse online? In this paper, we present a six-week audit of X's algorithmic content recommendations during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election by deploying 120 sock-puppet monitoring accounts to capture tweets from their personalized "For You" timelines. Our objective is to quantify out-of-network content exposure for right- and left-leaning user profiles and assess any potential inequalities and biases in political exposure. Our findings indicate that X's algorithm skews exposure toward a few high-popularity accounts across all users, with right-leaning users experiencing the highest level of exposure inequality. Both left- and right-leaning users encounter amplified exposure to accounts aligned with their own political views and reduced exposure to opposing viewpoints. Additionally, we observe that new accounts experience a right-leaning bias in exposure within their default timelines. Our work contributes to understanding how content recommendation systems may induce and reinforce biases while exacerbating vulnerabilities among politically polarized user groups. We underscore the importance of transparency-aware algorithms in addressing critical issues such as safeguarding election integrity and fostering a more informed digital public sphere.
Campaign — Free Our Feeds
Launched in January 2025, the campaign set an ambitious target to raise enough funds to back the development of an ecosystem of applications and users for open social media, focused initially on the AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky. Our funding targets include:
Meta’s “Trusted Experts” helped me run scam ads on Facebook and Instagram
A Reuters reporter created ads promising unrealistic investment returns and easily placed them on Meta's social media platforms.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan
Rob Leathern and Rob Goldman, who both worked at Meta, are launching a new nonprofit that aims to bring transparency to an increasingly opaque, scam-filled social media ecosystem.
Vote Leave's targeted Brexit ads released by Facebook
The social media ads that helped Vote Leave win the EU referendum are published in full for the first time.
Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies
Abstract. Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms act
Social Media Analysis - Signup
Plans for everyone! Fedica's free plan allows you to post to many platforms with 1 click, paid plans to supercharge your social media game! Map followers by country, state or city What followers are talking about now
Trump Action Tracker | Keeping a tally of Trump's actions
Free and independent tracker documenting Trump-related actions using verified news sources. Statements & plans mapped to authoritarianism domains.
Trump Action Tracker | Keeping a tally of Trump's actions
Free and independent tracker documenting Trump-related actions using verified news sources. Statements & plans mapped to authoritarianism domains.
Cognitive Load and Social Media Advertising
Social media engagement requires cognitive resources, which subsequently impact the advertisements consumers see while browsing. For the most part, however, advertising practitioners and scholars s...
Facebook Shouldn't Give Politicians More Power Than Ordinary Users
Amidst escalating rhetoric about alleged "anti-conservative bias" on social media, Facebook has doubled down on its policies exempting (some) politicians from its ordinary fact-checking and from its
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.
Donate to #FreeOurFeeds - help secure the future of social media, organized by Free Our Feeds
Free Our Feeds | A campaign to keep social media open, people-po… Free Our Feeds needs your support for #FreeOurFeeds - help secure the future of social media
One of the things must folks don't appreciate is that platforms like X and FB & Tiktok have pixel trackers embedded everywhere around the web. They gather your preferences based on what other sites share about you with them. Sites do this to get better ad targeting. BSky doesn't have that.
Freya Holmér
I genuinely miss the more algorithmic social media feeds, they help connect with fandoms and find new people to follow I've been on a nine sols/hollow knight/silksong arc for months, and bsky hasn't picked up on it at all meanwhile, twitter immediately did (...without even posting about it there)
