  Social media platforms are currently the main channel for political
messaging, allowing politicians to target specific demographics and adapt based
on their reactions. However, making this communication transparent is
challenging, as the messaging is tightly coupled with its intended audience and
often echoed by multiple stakeholders interested in advancing specific
policies. Our goal in this paper is to take a first step towards understanding
these highly decentralized settings. We propose a weakly supervised approach to
identify the stance and issue of political ads on Facebook and analyze how
political campaigns use some kind of demographic targeting by location, gender,
or age. Furthermore, we analyze the temporal dynamics of the political ads on
election polls.
