Can You Trace Misinformation on Social Media?

Mozilla Foundation and CheckFirst Investigate

Newsreel Asia Insight #197
April 20, 2024

According to a study by the Mozilla Foundation and the Finnish company CheckFirst, the ad libraries of major social media platforms—where they keep information about the ads they show—lack transparency. The issue of transparency in ad libraries, involving platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter), is particularly critical as over 60 countries gear up for elections in 2024, a significant and historic election year.

Transparent ad libraries help the public understand who is behind the advertisements they’re shown and what those advertisers are trying to achieve. This knowledge is crucial for making informed decisions, spotting potential misinformation and ultimately protecting the integrity of democratic processes, especially during election seasons for monitoring political messaging and voter targeting.

However, the study shows the social media platforms may not be fully equipped to handle the demands of upcoming global elections. It reveals that many of these platforms struggle to provide basic transparency in their ad libraries—tools crucial for researchers and journalists investigating disinformation, paid influence campaigns and the origins of viral posts.

Journalist often use these ad libraries to track political advertising trends. They find themselves stymied by X’s platform, which was highlighted for its particularly poor transparency tools, providing only slow-loading CSV files without a web interface. This complicates efforts for journalists to effectively track or report on ads. These CSV files, short for “Comma-Separated Values” files, are commonly used to transfer large amounts of data because they are easy to read and can be opened in many programs, like spreadsheets.

In contrast to X’s cumbersome process, other platforms allow basic ad library searches to be performed in seconds. After downloading X’s CSV files, users can’t easily filter or sort the information. The files only show links to the ads, not the ads themselves, and X does not provide any support or guidance to help users navigate their system.

Alphabet – the parent company of Google and several other companies previously owned by Google – received a slightly better evaluation, earning a rating for providing the “bare minimum data and functionality.” It operates a joint ad library for YouTube and Google Search but lacks essential features like keyword search, and does not allow filtering by platform, only by domain and advertiser name.

Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn have shown some improvements in transparency over the last few years. Meta now offers searchable historical data going back six years and has improved filtering options, but gaps remain. On Facebook, only 65% of the identified ads are traceable.

The report’s broader implications suggest that while some platforms have advanced their transparency tools, none have yet developed a fully functional ad repository capable of equipping researchers and the public with the necessary data to effectively monitor the impact of advertisements on the elections and broader social discourse.

To improve this situation, the report calls for significant enhancements in social media platforms’ ad transparency tools, stressing the necessity for platforms to collect more comprehensive data on influencer posts and enhance their search functionalities to better serve the public and researchers aiming to safeguard democratic processes and social stability.