Ad Observer

by The Facebook Political Ad Collector team · Social Networking

Manifest V3 Free

View in Chrome Web Store Data as of 15 Oct 2026

A browser extension to share data about your social feed with researchers and journalists to increase transparency.

Users

2,000

0 in 30 days

Rating

4.3 / 5

unchanged in 30 days

Ratings

0 in 30 days

Store rank

#20K

#16K among extensions

Version

2.2.13 (ea4c344)

updated 9 Nov 2022

Users

monthly, 3 years

Latest, 15 Oct 2026: 2,000 usersMove the mouse over the chart for any month

Ratings count

monthly, 3 years

Latest, 15 Oct 2026: 28 ratingsMove the mouse over the chart for any month

The Chrome Web Store rounds user counts down to the leading digit, so the user line moves in steps. The ratings count is exact and is the better signal of real adoption.

About Ad Observer

Ad Observer is a crowdsourcing tool that will gather ads from a user's Facebook news feed—to enable investigative journalism and research. The project has new home and a new name. It is run by the Online Political Ads Transparency Project at New York University. This project used to be called the Political Ad Collector. Stewardship of the project was previously maintained by Quartz, The Globe and Mail and by ProPublica. When users log into Facebook, the tool will collect the ads displayed on the user's news feed and guess which ones are political. The tool does not collect any personally identifiable information. We will not know which ads are shown to which user. The political ads that are collected will be contributed to a database. We use the ads for research and journalistic purposes: covering Facebook, political messaging and digital advertising tactics.