Who Targets Me in 2025: What we’ve been working on
New tools, UK electoral policy proposals, a book, and our plans for tracking digital campaigns worldwide in 2026
Hi,
We’ve had a busy few months working on new tools, developing policy ideas and… a book (well, contributing to one). Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:
Trends: Redesigned and relaunched
Trends is our service that automatically tracks political ad spending on the major digital platforms around the world. Every day, we monitor the activity of more than 120,000 advertisers in more than 60 countries, updating the data as new ads appear and campaigns evolve.
We’ve recently relaunched the service with a new design and features. Trends now requires a free account, and for those who want to support our work, there are some paid subscription options for individual supporters and journalists.
If political advertising is something you work on, or something you want to understand better, check out the new version of Trends and create an account:
The forthcoming UK Elections Bill
The UK’s current election rules struggle to keep up with opaque money, global digital reach and outdated regulation.
The forthcoming elections bill wasn’t intended to be a big deal (the Labour Party manifesto pitched it as tidying up a few rules around the edges), but it doesn’t have to be that way.
We put together 20 policy ideas that could strengthen the Bill, reshape electoral rules and restore public trust in elections.
You can read them here:
https://whotargets.me/en/restoring-the-integrity-of-uk-election-campaigns/
[As this newsletter went to press, the UK government announced an inquiry into foreign influence in British politics. This is welcome, but we can’t just try to stop bad things. We also need to expand good ones, such as transparency and ensuring a level playing field]
Changes to the Who Targets Me browser extension in the EU
Following Meta and Google’s withdrawal from the EU political ad market in October, we’ve chosen to pause ad data collection via the Who Targets Me browser extension in the EU.
We hope this is temporary, and that the platforms reconsider this decision (which we believe unbalances political campaigning in favour of more extreme parties and candidates) and decide to provide a legally compliant political advertising service in the EU. Alternatively, the EU could look at amending the regulation the platforms blame for their decision (we understand there is a window to do this next year).
If you’re in the EU, you can still install the Who Targets Me extension, but it won’t collect any data or produce any results unless the platforms restore political advertising services.
Of course, if you’re outside the EU, feel free to get involved.
Observing elections
Over the past year we’ve contributed to a number of election observation missions in countries including the Philippines, Bolivia, Guyana and Honduras. Trends has all the data we compiled for these missions.
For a long time we’ve argued it’s important to cover elections as if digital campaigning is normal, rather than something to talk about when problems occur. That lack of normalisation has led to a lot of hyperbole, bad assumptions and poor policy.
In short, it’s also absolutely fine to carefully describe what happened.
To that end, we co-wrote the chapter on the digital campaign in The General Election of 2024, the canonical academic study of the campaign, published after every election since 1945. It’s the first time the book has included a standalone chapter on the digital campaign, so we’re grateful for the opportunity to add something new. We hope someone (maybe even us) will do the same again in 2029, 2034, 2039 and beyond.
Looking ahead to elections in 2026
We’re planning to work on (as usual) a whole host of elections next year, including (but not necessarily limited to) the UK’s national parliament and local elections, the US midterms, Brazil, several Indian state elections, a Canadian province, Israel, Peru and New Zealand. We’re also going to be looking at the effectiveness of the platform bans on political ads in the EU. If you’re working on, or are interested in, any of these, do get in touch.
That’ll do for 2025. Have a very Happy Christmas and New Year! See you next year.
Who Targets Me