Research Tools: NYU Tandon Data Scientists Launch Tool to Analyze Facebook Political Advertising in Canada

From New York University:

Computer scientists at New York University Tandon School of Engineering today launched a new website that analyzes all Canadian Facebook political advertising in the leadup to the October 21 elections. The interactive, user-friendly website lets users easily explore the data and break down the advertising spend based on party, target demographic, region, and other factors. The full data is available at: onlinepoliticaltransparencyproject.org.

The data was compiled using cutting-edge machine learning and data scraping tools, and expands on the team’s 2018 political advertising analysis, called the Online Transparency Project, which has already reviewed more than 1 million ads identified by Google, Twitter, and Facebook to determine how much political organizations were spending to target U.S. voters.

The project was funded by the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge, a collaborative effort between Elizabeth Dubois, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and a Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa (français), and Taylor Owen, an associate professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge supports academic research into the impacts and uses of digital media during the 2019 Federal Election in Canada.

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