The Meta Ad Library stores information about Facebook ads. From September 7 last year, Meta started giving information about the income from political advertisements in Bangladesh.
About $370,000, which is a little more than Tk 40 million, has been spent in the year to September 7 this year targeting Bangladeshi users.
Digitally Right’s study studied 355 Facebook pages that spent more than US$100 per year on political ads. Of these, 72 pages place themselves in the political category. 43,630 advertisements were published on the remaining 283 pages, of which 1,420 were sampled by the researchers.
Digitally Right also said they had analyzed 683 political advertisements that had been blocked from circulation due to lack of transparency. Fifty other ads being reviewed by Meta for circulation restrictions also emerged in Digitally Right’s analysis.