As part of a transparency effort, Facebook provides an API to review adverts that have been posted to their platform. Though they provide a UI to look at this data, it's important for transparency focused organisations, such as Who Targets Me, to be able to review this in different ways. To that end, we created this tool.
Python 3, PostgreSQL, a Facebook developer account and a Facebook access token.
virtualenv venvsource venv/bin/activatepip install -r requirements.txt
- Create a database and ensure it's details are in you config
The project makes use of FLASK_ENV with default of production for config
switching. Options are development or production.
You could export FLASK_ENV=development if you want to always use that.
Make sure your details are correct in config/<FLASK_ENV>.py
For the first run, FLASK_ENV=development flask db upgrade
Subsequent runs are FLASK_ENV=development flask run, which run locally on localhost:5000
Before you do anything, you're going to need Facebook token.
We won't got through the steps of getting a token here, but ideally you want a long token that can last a couple of months.
You'll want to add that token to tokens table in the database.
- Add/update advertisers
POST, PUT {{url}}/add/advertisers (page_id cannot be updated - POST will raise, PUT will update other details)
Example: {{url}}/add/advertisers Example body:
{"advertisers":
[
{"page_id":"164027949687", "page_name": "Labour Party", "country": "GB"}, {"page_id":"8807334278", "page_name": "Conservatives", "country": "GB"}
]
}
GET {{url}}/loadall//<advertiser_id>
Example (load by page_id): {{url}}/loadall/GB/8807334278
Example (load all for country): {{url}}/loadall/GB/all
Problems installing psycopg2?
Make sure you have pg_client. Just run that on your CLI to test.
Maybe clang error library not found for -lssl? Maybe you installed openssl via
brew, so set env vars for LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS.
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"