[okintheory]

That's funny! Did you try it? I find it impossible to get any useful information out of it.

Literally the first ad that Facebook shows on my "newsfeed" is by "Jellop", but when I search for Jellop in their ad library, I get no results. In fact, I can't seem to get any results at all, regardless of what I search for, or what I select as the country.

[ummonk]

Perhaps I misunderstood. The tool shows any ads on political and social issues, which should cover all the ads you mentioned (e.g. Exxon, Koch, insurance cos.), but won't cover Jellop ads.

[okintheory]

That is a fair point! I did mainly mean to focus on social and political issues. I guess the question is what counts as transparent. In my mind, it should not be as easy as creating a new "page" to hide the connection between different sources.

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but my impression is that FB is aiming to provide just enough information that people will say "they're doing that already", and not enough that people can really understand what's going on. But I might be wrong.

The Ad Library claims to show all active ads, not just political/social ones. That's presumably true, but hard to verify or make use of. The "Jellop" ad that I couldn't find was missing precisely because the page name was something else they'd created for that ad.