The new Ad Observatory tool from @nyutandon is a great way to track political ad spending on Facebook. One of its best features is that it lets you monitor spending automatically with a range of different alerts. This thread will show you how.
Step 1: You'll need to sign up for an account at adobservatory.org as email notifications are only available if you have registered. Luckily, this tool is free for journalists (including freelancers) and approval usually happens within a business day.
Step 2: State pages are a good place to start when browsing ideas for what notifications to set up. Clicking on individual races and top spenders shows more detail, like micro-targeting. Here's a comparison of ad spending from Congressional candidates in Florida’s 3rd district
Step 3: Set up your notifications. Click “notifications” at the top of the page and then “Add New.” Ad Observatory allows you to set up alerts for spending surges by topic, ad sponsor and much more. Alerts can be sent daily or weekly.
Here’s an example of what the email notifications look like. According to the alert, more than $107,000 has been poured into ads about the court system in Florida in the past week.
Any questions about the tool? Reach out to info@adobservatory.org
For more tips on investigating Facebook ad spending, check out our webinar on how to use the Facebook Ad Library: firstdraftnews.org/latest/how-to-…
Also our webinar on using the Facebook Ad Library is also available in Spanish:
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2/12 Our Australia team continues its work at @UTSEngage, monitoring social media and conducting research on how to counter online mis- and dis-information. They will be an official partner of the @IFL_Brown
3/12 First Draft began in 2015 as a small nonprofit coalition that sprung out of a need: to understand, verify, and provide guidance on the misinformation we all were seeing on the social web. Over the following six years, we built out teams in London, New York, and Sydney.
A large amount of mis- and disinformation has circulated on social media in multiple languages over the past few days regarding #Ukraine. Trustworthy information is as important as ever in times of crisis, so here are our top tips and tools 👇
First and foremost, be wary of the difference between MISinformation and DISinformation. While they can seem interchangeable, the difference lies in the intent. Precise language is important e.g. propaganda can fall under the umbrella of disinformation
Second, visual misinformation gains a lot of attention. We’ve seen time and time again old photos and videos recirculated during times of crisis, which can cause more chaos and confusion. Preventing this can be as easy as running a reverse image search
1/ First Draft’s latest piece looks at anti-Muslim content spread on YouTube and TV news in India
2/ First Draft examined 70 headlines from stories about the Tablighi Jamaat run by some of India’s most-watched news channels, as well as a number of news outlets over the past year
3/ Of those headlines, we found that 27 used anti-Muslim language, while four made misleading, false or out-of-context claims
1/ How are climate change conspiracy theories and misinformation spreading cross-platforms and escalating over-time?
2/ First Draft’s @carlottadotto analyzed climate change-related conversations over the past year on the fringe platforms 4chan and 8kun. YouTube was the most popular domain used to support climate change denialism, followed by Bitchute, web archive links, and Wikipedia.
3/ The rampant use of YouTube links on 4chan and 8kun emphasizes how misinformation on the platform is being pushed to networks in other online spaces.
In the wake of recent vaccine announcements, reporters and policymakers need to be tracking “data deficits” — situations where demand for information about a topic is high, but the supply of credible information is low. We outline two of them below. 🧵👇firstdraftnews.org/long-form-arti…
1. mRNA technology, DNA alteration and foreign propaganda narratives. mRNA vaccines’ novelty and technical complexity complicates efforts to provide accessible and compelling information on this technology, while the incentive for bad actors to exploit this gap is high.
2. Measures of vaccine “effectiveness,” trial stages’ “interim” results and other limitations of the vaccine announcements. Information detailing these limitations are often missing from reporting, which could erode public confidence in Covid-19 vaccines.
Today the UK became the first Western country to approve a Covid-19 vaccine. Following this and other recent vaccine trial and approval announcements, here are five misinformation narratives reporters should be aware of when covering these stories. 🧵👇 firstdraftnews.org/latest/vaccine…
1. A Covid-19 vaccine is unnecessary; the immune system is superior. This narrative is now comparing Covid-19 survival rates to the efficacy rates of the current vaccines to suggest that our immune systems are more capable than vaccines in protecting us from Covid-19.
The narrative that hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness eliminates the need for a Covid-19 vaccine, highly popular among many Francophone communities in Europe and Africa, has been applied to recent vaccine trial announcements.