On Monday Facebbok said, it would provide academic researchers information on how political ads were targeted in the lead-up to the presidential election in the United States last year.
The data would include targeting criteria, such as location and interests, selected by advertisers running social issue, electoral or political ads, the social media giant said.
Facebook said in a blog post, academics and researchers can apply for access to this information through the Facebook Open Research & Transparency (FORT) platform on February 1, adding that the data package would cover more than a million ads that ran between August 3 and November 3.
Both Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google have currently paused political ads after the presidential election as part of measures to police misinformation and other abuses.
Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, and a flagship service of the namesake company Facebook, Inc. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
The founders of Facebook initially limited membership to Harvard students. Membership was expanded to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale before being expanded to the rest of the Ivy League, MIT, and higher education institutions in the Boston area, then various other universities, and lastly high school students.