Google just erased 7 years of our political history
Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting – on YouTube, on Search and for display ads – for countless elections across 27 countries – is all gone. We had been told that Google would try to stop people placing political ads, a “ban” that was to come into effect this week. I did not read anywhere that this would mean the erasure of this archive of our political history. When you go to the Google Ad Archive (which you can here: https://adstransparency.google.com/) until last week you could search all political ads shown in your country by a date range of your choosing going back to 2018. You could browse all the ads in that range, or search for keywords, candidates, parties. You could…
