Facebook Ads Offer Peek at Looming Supreme Court Fight
Even before President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee is announced, a fight over the choice is raging on social media.
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Even before President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee is announced, a fight over the choice is raging on social media.
Until Facebook introduced its ad archive, political advertisers could hide their messages from public view with the use of so-called dark posts, nonpublic ads that are shown only to the subset of users who are included in the ad’s target audience and are invisible to everyone else.
These steps have been controversial among news publishers, but they have been popular among journalists and watchdog groups, who have lauded them as a valuable peek behind the dark-money curtain.
“This is more information than we’ve ever had previously about what dark money groups are doing online,” said Brendan Fischer, a program director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “Up until this point, we really had no information whatsoever about how much money a group like Judicial Crisis Network was spending on digital ads, much less what those ads looked like or who they were targeted to.”