Google just erased 7 years of our political history

Summary

Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting - on YouTube, on Search and for display ads - for countless elections across 27 countries - is all gone. We had been told that Google would try to stop people placing political ads, a "ban" that was to come into effect this week. I did not read anywhere that this would mean the erasure of this archive of our political history. When you go to the Google Ad Archive (which you can here: https://adstransparency.google.com/) until last week you could search all political ads shown in your country by a date range of your choosing going back to 2018. You could browse all the ads in that range, or search for keywords, candidates, parties. You could view each ad - watch the video, see the images - who had been targeted, how much had been spent etc. New here? Sign up to get The Briefing in your inbox. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below): The page you are diverted too if you try to find political ads on Google. The political ad archive - now deleted? - allowed people like me (and many others) to understand what happened in elections, like this longer piece I was able to write during the European & Local elections last year on the use of YouTube by a far right party, Sinn Féin's big push on search result ads, and the growth of attacks ads in Ireland: Campaign round up: Irish Freedom Party dominating YouTube ad spendThe Irish Freedom Party spent €4,100 in the past 3 weeks on YouTube ads, the biggest spenders on YouTube ads this election.Now you need the specific name of an advertiser, and when I looked for, for example, "Sinn Fein", it (a) only gave me the option of searching for their website, and (b) showed zero results...