Jeremy Merrill

Google has been treating Beto O'Rourke's campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for US federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake. But the Beto ads were missing from the archive. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.

You may be a reliable Democratic voter in a solid-blue city. Maybe you have a graduate degree; maybe you’re a member of an ethnic or religious minority; maybe you are a woman. Any of these would make you a likely Hillary Clinton supporter. So why did you just see an ad for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign on Facebook?

The New York Times has collected an extensive database of political Facebook ads, and data about how they are targeted, from our readers as part of our Political Ad Tracker project. Microtargeted online advertisements can be a powerful tool for political campaigns to tailor a message to specific people they are trying to reach. But the reason you saw a particular campaign ad on Facebook may have nothing to do with your political views, or even your demographic profile. It could depend on whether you live in a swing state and on your internet activity — or be practically random. You can find the reasons you were shown a particular ad, political or otherwise, on Facebook with just a few steps.

You may think you are discreet about your political views. But Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has come up with its own determination of your political leanings, based on your activity on the site. And now, it is easy to find out how Facebook has categorized you — as very liberal or very conservative, or somewhere in between. Facebook makes a deduction about your political views based on the pages that you like — or on your political preference, if you stated one, on your profile page. If you like the page for Hillary Clinton, Facebook might categorize you as a liberal. Even if you do not like any candidates’ pages, if most of the people who like the same pages that you do — such as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream — identify as liberal, then Facebook might classify you as one, too.