This URL will direct you to the Facebook Ad library for the president's reelection campaign. [https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&impression_search_field=has_impressions_lifetime&view_all_page_id=153080620724] And this to an article in The Atlantic that will provide some needed context: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
My point and my question: The article linked reports a phenomenal number of paid advertisements distributed by the Trump campaign that target users of the Facebook platform based on 3000+ data points on American voters. In an effort to try to reverse engineer this massive dataset to see how Trump's social media team are applying this data, I would like to scrape the Facebook Ad Library. Problem is that the library loads only a couple of ads at a time and $32,552,007 dollars worth of ads would take years to load... if I had a machine capable of it. A chrome extension that would auto-scroll crashed my browser after about 30 mins. I had only loaded ads up until February 13th, 2020.
While Facebook touts that it has made this information available and transparent, it is closely guarded from critical eyes by way of website mechanisms that limit access and in this case, inhibit access altogether. Literally speaking, the information is accessible, but only in a very limited capacity.
I have searched around looking for a way to defeat or spoof the javascript infinite scroll functionality but to no avail. Facebook does not make this easy.
So I am asking you all, who are way more able than I am to debug this issue: how can we see the complete history of these political ads? Compiling this data in an open-source project on all political candidates could take considerable strides in achieving a more open discourse.