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Facebook and Google: This is What an Effective Ad Archive API Looks Like
Mozilla and a cohort of independent researchers have detailed the key traits that make for an effective ad archive API — and more transparent elections
On March 28 — after urging from dozens of civil society organizations — Facebook is set to launch its advertising archive API. This tool is intended to provide researchers, journalists, and users with transparency into political ads and audience targeting on Facebook.
Google also pledged to launch a similar tool ahead of the May 2019 EU Parliamentary elections (but postponed their initial March launch date.) As disinformation continues to spread across online platforms with the potential to interfere with democratic elections, it’s critical that these tools are accessible and effective.
So today, Mozilla and a cohort of 10 independent researchers are publishing five guidelines that these APIs must meet in order to truly support election influence monitoring and independent research.
Says Ashley Boyd, Mozilla’s VP of Advocacy: “Researchers play a critical role in tracking and reporting disinformation, and then sharing this information with the public and public officials. These API guidelines — developed with technical and policy experts — represent baseline requirements which would empower researchers to better understand and document how disinformation spreads, how it influences elections, and how it impacts society.”
Boyd continues: “Our goal is to ensure lawmakers and the public can critically assess Facebook and Google’s transparency efforts. And, can hold the tech companies accountable if they fall short.”
The 10 experts are based at Oxford University, the University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, and other institutions.
These guidelines are being shared publicly with European Commissioners Mariya Gabriel, Julian King, Andrus Ansip, and Vera Jourova, who are responsible for assessing how platforms are upholding their commitments under the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. The guidelines are also being shared with Facebook and Google.
The guidelines + our letter to policymakers and the tech companies:
To: Google, Facebook, Twitter
Cc: Vice President of the European Commission Andrus Ansip, European Commissioners Mariya Gabriel, Vera Jourova, Julian King
We, the undersigned, are independent researchers investigating the wide variety of issues that are crucial to understanding the impact of disinformation on our societies. This includes research into:
To do this work effectively, there must be fully functional, open APIs that enable advanced research and the development of tools to analyse political ads targeted to EU residents. This requires access to the full scope of data relevant to political advertising, and that access must be provided in a format that allows for rich analysis. Tools provided often lack the necessary data or, due to limited functionality, do not allow for analysis.
A functional, open API should have the following:
[1] Comprehensive political advertising content. The APIs should include paid political ads and issue-based ads, without limiting access on the basis of pre-selected topics or keywords. “Political” ads might include, but are not limited to:
Non-paid, public content that is generated by users who are known political content purveyors should also be available.
[2] The content of the advertisement and information about targeting criteria, including:
[3] Functionality to empower, not limit, research and analysis, including:
[4] Up-to-date and historical data access, including:
[5] Public access. The API itself and any data collected from the API should be accessible to and shareable with the general public.
In the spirit of upholding the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, we expect you to empower the research community by implementing open, functional APIs of the quality outlined in this letter — just as we expect elected officials and public authorities to fully support the release of such data in a privacy-compliant fashion to enable independent research and inform public debate. Your action on this is essential to ensuring the integrity of the upcoming European Parliamentary elections — as well as elections happening all around the globe — is upheld.
Yours Sincerely,
Mozilla Foundation
Co-written by
Co-signed by
If you are a researcher working on these issues and want to co-sign this letter please contact us at [email protected], and we will add names on a rolling basis to this letter.
This work is part of Mozilla’s larger effort to combat online disinformation ahead of the upcoming EU elections, and other elections around the world in 2019. We’re closely following the commitments these companies made in the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, in order to influence the development and assessment of the most effective tools possible.
Earlier this year, Mozilla and dozens of our allies sent a public letter to Facebook, demanding the company make good on their promises to provide more transparency around political advertising. Mozilla also conducted an EU-wide survey on the state of misinformation, and found that nearly 84 percent of people polled suspected (or knew for certain) that they had seen misinformation while using the internet that very week.