> 4 isn't right (anymore) because they made all political ads available to anyone who wants to see them.
I think #4 is still valid:
1. Facebook may not be to correctly identify political ads vs other ads.
2. Their Ad Library seems to be missing important information [1].
3. A disclosure like the Ad Library still obscures influence campaigns by greatly reducing the ability of watchdogs to passively monitor the political discourse. Instead they have expend much more manpower to actively monitor the library with the right search terms, and if they fail to do that they'll miss things.
> Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.
> Our tool regularly caught political ads that aren’t reflected in Facebook’s archive. Just this month, we noticed four groups running ads that haven’t been in Facebook’s archive:
> Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m not so sure about #3.
I think you overstate #3 a little bit. It could have been happening without Facebook, but at a lower scale and not effectively enough to matter.
I think there's also a #4:
4. Facebook ad-targeting allows the influence to be covert, because watchdog group members are probably not part of the targeted demographics.