ABSTRACT
Digital platform-based political advertising plays a crucial role in modern political campaigns. Despite the significant impact on democratic processes, the underlying technical and social mechanisms of these newer advertising systems are still largely opaque, impeding independent, systematic study of political ad content and its delivery to specific audiences (Saunders, 2020). While many major platforms now provide tools purportedly aimed at enabling 'transparency' of political advertising, from a critical research perspective, these tools are highly limited (Leerssen et al., 2019). This chapter overviews a suite of computational research infrastructures aimed at enhancing the discoverability, comparability, and observability of platform-based political advertising. Designed primarily for communication and media scholars, these tools are valuable for anyone interested in monitoring political ad content, delivery, and reception within digital ecosystems. We introduce and describe research infrastructures beyond existing ad transparency dashboards offered by major platforms. This includes the Australian Ad Observatory - custom browser plugin, The Mobile Observation of Advertising Toolkit (MOAT) - a privacy-aware mobile scraping app that enables data donation, and Polidashboard - a web app that offers enhanced analytics and near-real-time tracking of targeted ads related to politics, elections, or social issues on Meta's advertising platforms. This paper discusses the technical foundations of these tools, their strengths and limitations, ethical and privacy concerns, and considerations for researchers adopting these approaches.
