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After increased public scrutiny, Google has released a searchable library of its political ads.

Here’s an insanely huge library of every political ad on Google

[Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Nelson); Pat Arnow/Wikimedia Commons (Cuomo); U.S. Senate/Wikimedia Commons (Menendez); David Angel/Unsplash; Flickr user Pavel P.]

BY Cale Guthrie Weissman

A few months back, after public scrutiny over the opacity of its ad program, Google promised to be more transparent about how political ads work on its platform. And today, the company launched a new website that keeps track of every political ad–letting users see which states spent the most and what kind of ads political groups are deploying.

This library is part of Google’s transparency report, and essentially lets you look at every ad from a verified political advertiser.

[Screenshot: courtesy of Google Transparency Report]
Unsurprisingly, Florida is the state that had the most ad spend.And the advertiser that spent the most was “Trump Make America Great Again Committee.”There are a whole lot of other categories you can look into–including keywords and dates. It’s especially interesting to compare these toadvertisementson Facebook.

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Despite this move from Google, the company may still face some issues. For example, advocates in Washington have accused both Facebook and Google of violating a law that requires them to disclose political ads.

You can check out the Google political advertising library here.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cale is a Brooklyn-based reporter. He writes about many things. More


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