Advertisement and Microtargeting

PoliDashboard is an app for tracking political advertisements on Meta-owned advertising platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. It is designed to help voters, journalists, campaign staffers and others to track the use of targeted ads around social issues, elections or politics. The data is automatically updated every day via the Facebook Ad API and is developed by the Social Media Lab based at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Within the disinformation and memory studies direction, the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) team is developing tools in several ways. Firstly, IDFI research historical roots and disinformation narratives that are weaponized in contemporary times. Secondly, IDFI develops academic courses that are offered to the students in schools of media and social sciences, and to representatives of CSOs and civil servants.

Who Targets Me are a small group of activists creating and managing a crowdsourced global database of political adverts placed on social media.

We were founded by Sam Jeffers and Louis Knight Webb in 2017 during the UK elections to monitor the use of online political ads in real time and provide analysis of their intended impact. The Who Targets Me plug-in has now been installed by over 30,000 users worldwide in more than 100 countries and 20 languages.

PubliElectoral is a technological tool of social interest that allows the collection
of information related to electoral advertising on social networks without affecting the privacy of citizen users. PubliElectoral is an extension (or plug-in) that is downloaded and installed in the internet browser (computer or desktop). When the user browses a Facebook page, it detects the political advertisements that are shown according to their profile and stores them in a database, so that later the team of the Association for Civil Rights (ADC) can contrast them and analyze.

Even if you don’t care about being chased by the latest sneaker or flight destination that you’ve recently searched for, the ongoing Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal has shed light on a common and disturbing practice undertaken by the world’s largest social network: the vast amount of personal data gathered about us is progressively used to shape our behavior, wishes and needs.

For many — especially women and non-binary people — this approach can be even more aggressive, reinforcing gender roles, heteronormativity and, therefore, discrimination against diversity.

FightHoax offers a seamless way to extract actionable insights from news, allowing DSPs to increase the advertising ROI for their customers, through smart brand safety filters and deep contextual targeting.

It is a Greek company that has developed a fact-checking software for news analysis. They intend to sell it to news organizations, and small businesses. Free demo is available.

The Digital Democracy Charter outlines several guiding principles on countering online disinformation and strengthening our democracies given the new digital age. This charter suggests some possible reforms and policies.

(Independently written)