Facebook’s Experiment in Ad Transparency Is Like Playing Hide And Seek

Facebook has said it plans to avoid a repeat of the Russia fiasco by improving transparency. An approach it’s rolling out in Canada now, and plans to expand to other countries this summer, enables Facebook users outside an advertiser’s targeted audience to see ads. The hope is that enhanced scrutiny will keep advertisers honest and make it easier to detect foreign interference in politics. So we used a remote connection, called a virtual private network, to log into Facebook from Canada and see how this experiment is working. The answer: It’s an improvement, but nowhere near the openness sought by critics who say online political advertising is a Wild West compared with the tightly regulated worlds of print and broadcast.