Here's more about the changes we've made (and where we're taking it next):

After many months work, we launched a major new version of our Trends political ad tracking platform this morning. Take a look (and let us know your feedback - we'd love to hear from you): https://t.co/G3S1OmWE77

Put a calendar hold for a meeting** on Friday. (**Playing pickleball)

A long(ish) piece on the implications of Meta's forthcoming political advertising ban in the EU: https://t.co/w4CwzZhWxd

If the EU doesn't act, it suggests that it actually wanted this all along and the Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising was in fact intended as a "slow ban". That will prove to be a mistake.

Near monopolies should not be able to make de facto law about whether legitimate, legal protected speech is allowed. There are two options - either the EU requires political ads be accepted, or it extends the transparency requirements to cover all ads on VLOPs.

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Banning political ads harms smaller campaigns, and privileges those whose more extreme speech is favoured by engagement-driven algorithms. First Google, then Meta, leaving the political advertising market is actively harmful to democracy.

Meta's decision to follow Google and discriminate against paid political speech in the EU is misguided and wrong. If you accept ads, you should accept political ads, it's as simple as that. The company can afford proper transparency and verification.

If you're interested in political ad data, we have a little survey running on https://t.co/wCV3AjPSiT - we'd love to hear from you.

Use Trends from @WhoTargetsMe to explore digital ad spending by over 100k political accounts in more than 50 countries: https://t.co/F4xrIWXaAh

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Here's what the parties spent on digital ads: 🌻 Die Grünen - €4.1m 🟨 FDP - €2.3m 🌹 SPD (inc. Mediaforce) - €1.6m 🇩🇪 CDU/CSU - €1.6m ⚡ Volt Deutschland - €1.1m 🟦 AfD - €900k 🙋‍♀️ BSW - €800k 🫲 Die Linke - €470k 🆓 Freie Wähler - €80k

Between the collapse of the German government on Nov 6th and the election on Feb 23rd, parties and candidates spent around €14m on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google (YouTube, Search and Display) ads. That's in the region of 2bn ads, or 50 for every voter who turned out.

Gespräch im ZDF Magazin Royale: Wahlkampf & Plattformmacht im #Grauburgunderbereich 🍷 Ich habe das ZDF-Team mit @favstats & @WhoTargetsMe bei der Recherche für die Sendung zum digitalen Wahlkampf unterstützt & landete im Studio Ehrenfeld. Das Ergebnis:

We've made some changes to our political ad trends platform to make it easier to find data for forthcoming elections. Tracking over 100k Meta and Google advertisers with it. Have a look: https://t.co/F4xrIWXaAh

Over the coming months, we'll be adding new features to Trends. To help with the cost of running the tools, some will need a login or subscription. To stay up to date, automatically get a free account and a discount on new paid features, sign up here: https://t.co/bqJDBJWPD4

Over the coming months, we'll be adding new features to Trends. To help with the cost of running the tools, some will need a login or subscription. To stay up to date, automatically get a free account and a discount on new paid features, sign up here: https://t.co/bqJDBJWPD4

Reform are the biggest UK party for Meta ads in the last three months (though their spend is very spiky, whereas Labour's is more "always on"). This recent spike isn't quite of the scale of their spending over Christmas.

There is a real question as to whether Reform is a party capable of winning a UK election, but they certainly seem to be the most capable when it comes to generating online support at this point in time.

Reform have been running a Facebook ad campaign about a number of May's local council elections being cancelled. At least £10k spent on the ads so far. The petition they point to claims over 350,000 signatures - a big number. Lots of precious supporter data...

All the recent ad targeting data for the main German parties can be found here (aggregated across hundreds of active pages):

Meta has tried to limit the most "political" targeting options for ads in recent years, but advertisers always seem to be able to find a proxy for what they're looking for...