Political-ads-crowdsourcing-client

Allow citizens to assess the legality of political advertisement on digital platforms in the context of the European elections.

Permettre aux citoyens d'évaluer la légalité de la publicité politique sur les plateformes numériques dans le contexte des élections européennes.

This product focuses on political advertisement on Facebook and France but we intend to extend it to more sources. Your contributions are more than welcome.

This website displays ads that social network operators classify as political, i.e. that directly support a candidate, or that are related to a major issue of interest in the 2019 European elections (environment, immigration…).

Motivation

Since the beginning of May 2019, Facebook allows users to search its advertising library to access political and public-interest advertising and provides a detailed report for each country of the European Union. Nevertheless, this evaluation is now entirely delegated to private actors, and it seems important to help them better characterize what is relevant to the political debate or “of general interest”. We would like to allow all citizens to ensure that election propaganda complies with the rules. Moreover, by storing this data independently of its supplier, we guarantee its integrity over time.

We also make available all the advertisements we have collected for each country of the European Union in the form of data sets in JSON format in order to allow them to be reused as simply as possible. Moreover, this exposure of data is currently the only way for people without a certified Facebook developer account and technical know-how to access the data.

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Development

This project is built on top of react-boilerplate.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/ambanum/political-ads-legality.git
cd political-ads-legality
npm install

The backend server political-ads-scraper is required.

Usage

Start the server

npm start

Deployment

Modify the production configuration file config/production.js with the URL of your API endpoint:

const config = {
  apiUrl: 'https://<YOUR_SERVER>/api/politicals-ads/1.0',
};

module.exports = config;

Build the application and send the built files to your server. On your server, you can simply serve the built application as a set of static files. For example, you can do this with Nginx by adding these lines to your configuration file:

    …
    location /political-ads {
        alias /home/user/political-ads/build/;
        index index.html;
        try_files $uri $uri/ index.html =404;
    }
    …

For information on how we deploy this app, you can take a look at the role political-ads-crowdsourcing-client in our disinfo.quaidorsay.fr-ops repository

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License

EUPL v1.2: akin to an AGPL, but more readable and translated and legally binding into all languages of the EU. Recap.