Facebook Political Ad Collectorby Tom Cardoso, Jeremy B. Merrill, investigative reporter, Quartz

The Political Ad Collector is a crowdsourcing tool, maintained by national Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, that will gather political ads from user's Facebook News Feeds.

(The Globe and Mail, a partner on the ad collector, has taken over stewardship of the project which was previously maintained by ProPublica.)

When users log into Facebook, the tool will collect the ads displayed on the user's news feed and guess which ones are political. The tool will also show users political ads that others are seeing, but that weren’t targeted at them.

The tool does not collect any personally identifiable information, and will not learn which ads are shown to which user. The political ads that are collected will be contributed to a public database.

We use the ads for journalistic purposes: covering Facebook, political messaging and digital advertising tactics.

This extension is part of a partnership between The Globe and Mail and many news organizations around the world.

Our partners include:
- ProPublica (United States)
- Openpolis (Italy)
- Republik (Switzerland)
- The Guardian Australia
- Der Spiegel (Germany)
- Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
- Tagesschau (Germany)
- Dutch Public Broadcasting (Netherlands)
- the Information (Denmark)
- VRT NWS (Belgium)
- De Tijd (Belgium)
- CBC (Canada)
- Animal Político (Mexico)
- The Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism Re:Baltica
- Deseret News (Utah)
- The Bridge (Michigan)
- WRAL (North Carolina)
- The Stranger (Washington state)
- Gizmodo
- Univision
- The Tampa Bay Times (Florida)