To help us track political ads targeted to you on Facebook, click here.

If you're interested in talking about the ads you're seeing on Facebook, email me at: tmosley@kqed.org

If you scrolled through Facebook at any time during the 2016 election cycle, you were likely inundated with political ads. A significant number of those ads were purchased by foreign actors, with the intent of sowing discord and influencing the election. Last fall, we reported on several examples, including how social media was used to spark racial animus.

The midterm elections are just a few short months away, and we can expect to see yet again a slew of political ads about California races on TV, radio and online. Facebook ads, however, offer a layer of sophistication beyond those you see on other platforms. Facebook advertisements are micro-targeted, meaning only you can see them, and that makes it hard to fact-check them.

Recently, Facebook made political advertisers verify who they are and who's paying for their ads. But it's still hard to know what's out there, because these ads are specifically targeted to certain demographics.

With your help, we want to get closer to the truth, and uncover what ads you're seeing.

KQED is pleased to announce a new collaboration with ProPublica, recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for public service. Using a simple browser extension created by ProPublica, KQED will be able to observe and analyze tens of thousands of political ads. This project will help us report on deceptive ads that flood your feeds.

Here’s how it works:

The tool copies ads you see while scrolling through your Facebook feed. It is a browser-based plug-in that does not actually collect any data from Facebook itself. The data instead are pulled from the HTML of the ads that people pay to push into your feed directly from your browser. The plug-in does not collect any personal information.

ProPublica’s Political Ad Collector relies entirely on users like you to gather ads for its database. You can do this by downloading ProPublica’s browser add-on (for Firefox or Chrome) to contribute to this database.

ProPublica's Political Ad Collector is open source and can be audited by anyone.

To get started, click here.

If you're interested in talking about the ads you're seeing on Facebook, email me at: tmosley@kqed.org