The Impact of New Transparency in Digital Advertising on Media Coverage (Ad Library Data & Codebook)

In response to foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign through social media—and subsequent congressional threats to tightly regulate online political advertising—major digital platforms in the U.S. established databases that allow users to look up online political ads, their sponsors and how much they spend on advertising. What has been the impact of this new transparency? This research examines media coverage of digital political advertising in three news outlets both before and after the release of the Facebook, Google and Twitter political ads libraries in May 2018. We find that media coverage of digital advertising increased after the libraries’ introduction, that the libraries are sometimes referenced in coverage, that discussion of ad costs has increased as has fact-checking and discussion of misinformation.