This is the first concrete data delivery from the election research project Facebook announced in September 2020, which paired two dozen staffers with 17 independent academics. The company has been here before under pressure: it handed over Russia-linked ad records to Congressional investigators after 2016 and built the political ad archive in May 2018, but researchers have long argued the archive shows what ran, not whom it reached.
The gap between those two is exactly what this release closes — and it comes after researchers complained that Facebook had weakened or disabled their tracking tools just as 2020 spending ramped up, making the company's willingness to share raw targeting data a meaningful reversal.
First-order effects
The 17 independent researchers on the election project can now analyze exactly who saw 1.3M social issue, electoral, and political ads from August 3 through November 3, 2020 — audience attributes rather than just ad creative.
Second-order effects
Demonstrating that targeted political ads can be studied without leaking user identities gives Meta a template for broader access — which it followed in 2022 by promising outside researchers more political ad targeting info and richer Ad Library data from July onward (Meta's expanded researcher access).
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, platform transparency shifts from self-published archives toward negotiated researcher pipelines — with platforms retaining control over who gets access and on what terms, a structure regulators studying political ad rules will have to contend with.
The trend: Political ad transparency is evolving from public archives of ad content toward controlled researcher access to targeting data, with each election cycle expanding what platforms concede.
@fbnewsroom Why is it only open to U.S. University based researchers and not to journalists? Going through the application to access the data throws a “Sorry, something went wrong error” for me.
It didn't happen overnight, but I'm glad @Facebook finally took the step to make this kind of data available to researchers. Now it's time for this data to be made more broadly available in the archive, as the Honest Ads Act would require. https://twitter.com/...
Weirdly the research data agreement is not dated and appears to be a draft https://socialscience.one/... https://socialscience.one/... https://twitter.com/...
Facebook is now going to show researchers and journalists some targeting criteria - location and interests - for political ads. After years of asking and after the election. https://twitter.com/...
Next week, Facebook will give researchers access to some of the key targeting data for more than 1.3 million ads from the 2020 election. (NYU's Ad Observatory project was already doing this, but Facebook threatened legal action: https://www.wsj.com/...) https://twitter.com/...
Facebook says it will make targeting info available on its Facebook Open Research & Transparency platform for more than 1.3M social issue/electoral/political ads for the 3-month period prior to Election Day https://about.fb.com/...
NEW: Facebook is releasing targeting data on 2020 political ads to researchers/academics. This is something that researchers at NYU and elsewhere have been pushing hard on. It's only 3 months worth, but it's something. https://www.protocol.com/...