The Online Political Ads Transparency Project was conceived by Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Damon McCoy to build easy-to-use tools to collect, archive, and analyze political advertising data. Although Facebook became the first major social media company to launch a searchable archive of political advertising, for both Facebook and Instagram, in May 2018, McCoy found the archive difficult to use, requiring time-consuming manual searches. He decided to apply versions of the data scraping techniques he had previously used against criminals, including human traffickers who advertised and used Bitcoin.
July 18, 2018July 18, 2018Emerald Knox
CCS News