Our team at NYU performed an initial analysis of Facebook's archive of ads with political content that primarily span eight weeks from May 2018 - July 2018.

Facebook launched their searchable archive of U.S. political advertisements on May 24, 2018. We devise a data collection methodology to obtain a major chunk of political ads from Facebook's political ad archive. In our paper attached below, we include our initial analysis of Facebook's political ad archive, our methodology for collecting archived political ads, and a detailed description of the database of political ads that we are releasing in conjunction with the report.

According to Facebook: "The archive includes Facebook and Instagram ads that have been classified as containing political content, or content about national issues of public importance." This archive provides an increased level of transparency of political ads on Facebook and Instagram.

We investigate the following questions in analysis section of the paper:

• What is the size of political advertising on Facebook?
• Who is paying for political ads on Facebook?
• What issues are the focus of political ads on Facebook?
• Who is being shown political ads on Facebook?

We also dig into our data to discover the top sponsors, pages, demographic groups based on minimum impressions garnered.

• Paper?
• Technical Report?

Laura Edelson
Shikhar Sakhuja
Damon McCoy