Transition to Static

Based on a funding shortfall, NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy have come to the difficult decision to mothball the ongoing Ad Observatory project, the free, public dashboard providing ways to track digital misinformation and messaging trends in political ads on Facebook and Instagram. We want to sincerely thank all of our partners and supporters for their continued interest in this project.

We have worked to create the current static version of Ad Observatory, available now for exploring political advertising for the full year of 2022. This version of Ad Observatory will remain available to researchers and journalists to inform future analysis. All prior functionality remains with the exception of keyword searches and date range specification. 

We hope this won’t be the last you see of Ad Observatory. Going forward, we are going to be considering a range of organizational and funding models that might support this work in an ongoing, sustainable fashion.

We’re proud of the work we did together on Ad Observatory, cited in hundreds of stories and research reports. Ad Observatory helped local reporters in Florida, Utah, New Jersey, North Carolina report on local elections. It helped journalists expose how “scores of political groups sidestepped Facebook’s ad ban,” how Facebook gave former President Trump a better deal on political ads than it did current President Joe Biden, and how Trump flooded feeds with messages about crime and carnage. Ad Observatory helped researchers and journalists shine a light on dark money fueled political ops posing as local news sites, previewed DeSantis’ presidential ambitions, exposed hateful advertising, and helped to explain how candidates were communicating to voters in Spanish-language advertising. Ad Observatory data informed stories on post-Dobbs advertising about abortion, investigations about scams and political extremism.