Shady political ads are pouring into Facebook. We still can’t track them

Facebook has rolled out two key tools to increase transparency in response to Russian influence operations and the Cambridge Analytica data breach. … Damon McCoy was among the first researchers to use early versions of both tools. His team at New York University began scraping the ad archive, which initially included only political ads, in the weeks after it rolled out in May 2018. The huge trove of information yielded a significant finding: President Donald Trump shoveled far more cash into Facebook that month than any other political account.