The Third Path
The Old Goat said in The Ledger Behind the Persuaders that there were two more paths past the campaign filings: federal contracts, which the last dispatch covered, and the platform ad libraries, where a political ad has to say who paid. This is the third. The Old Goat has to open with a limit: the bulk pull did not happen.
UPDATE, Oct. 9, later: Google's data has since been pulled through its public BigQuery dataset. The result is in Fifty Videos, One State. Meta's library is still not pulled. The account below is what happened at the first attempt and is left as written.
What the Old Goat Could Not Pull
DOCUMENTED, by the Old Goat's own attempt on Oct. 9. Meta's Ad Library API returned an error to an unauthenticated query; it requires an access token tied to a verified identity, which the Old Goat does not hold. Google's public political-ads download, checked by its HTTP headers, is a 2,566-byte file last modified in June 2022, so it is a stub and not a current dataset. The Old Goat did not open either company's web interface, which loads its results by script. Zero is a claim, so here it is stated exactly: the Old Goat did not search Meta's or Google's libraries for MAGA Inc., the RNC, the White House or any vendor, and has no ad-library count to report for any of them.
That is itself worth saying plainly. The two public tools meant to let citizens see who is buying political persuasion cannot be queried in bulk by an ordinary person without credentials. Researchers who have them can. The rest of this dispatch is what they and reporters found.
What the Researchers Counted
REPORTED. The Wesleyan Media Project's Travis Ridout, Erika Franklin Fowler and Michael Franz wrote on Oct. 5, 2026 in The Conversation that they had tracked about $80 million in spending on almost 170 unique ads using AI in this cycle. Republican candidates or pro-Republican groups were behind 80% of the ads and 83% of the spending. Across 35 states, 31% of the ads disclosed AI use, representing 22% of the spending. In states with AI-ad laws, 29% of ads carried a disclaimer; in states without them, 32% did. The authors say the laws have "very little relationship" with whether a disclaimer appears.
Their examples include hyperrealistic deepfakes of Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with Ocasio-Cortez in at least five ads, mostly from Republican advertisers. An ad with synthetic video of Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan aired in May despite that state's deepfake law. Al Jazeera reported the same day that the New York Democratic Party filed a complaint over Bruce Blakeman's ads showing Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul gardening together, which carry an AI disclaimer for a few seconds. Blakeman calls them satire. The Wesleyan data covers candidates and groups in general. Neither article names MAGA Inc., the RNC or the White House as a sponsor of an AI ad, and the Old Goat is not claiming they are.
The Old Goat notes a count discrepancy. The Conversation says almost 170 ads; Al Jazeera cites the tracker as "more than 164" ads, which matches the Sept. 4 tally in an earlier summary. They are likely the same tracker at different dates. A state-law count differs too: 28 states in one Public Citizen quote, 31 in another. Neither was independently checked here.
What the Government Itself Is Buying
REPORTED. Taxpayer-funded advertising is a separate stream from campaign ads, and the ad libraries do show it. Representatives Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal wrote to Meta and Google in January and February 2026. Their letters, as reported by The Intercept, say DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads on Facebook and Instagram between March and December 2025 and paid Meta $500,000 more beginning in August, and that ICE had about $3 million in "self-deportation" ads on Google and YouTube, for $5.8 million combined. The letters questioned how Meta approved an ad using a song popular in neo-Nazi spaces. These are figures from congressional letters and the Equis tracker, not audited federal records. Axios reported that Meta's own library showed DHS targeting users who like Mexican pop music, Latin music and the Mexican national soccer team.
Set that beside the $20 million CBP "National Media Campaign" found in USAspending, ordered under the LMD agreement. DOCUMENTED: that order exists in the federal record. INFERENCE, the Old Goat's: the ad library is where the targeting parameters of such a campaign would show, and the record of who built the creative and the audiences sits in the same place. Nothing found shows these ads were made with AI. The Old Goat searched for that and the reporting does not say it.
The Hole in the Library
REPORTED, from an NYT review and an NBC review cited in search results the Old Goat did not open in full: Trump has posted AI-generated images or video on Truth Social at least 62 times since late 2022, with about half of the AI posts in August and September 2025, and on Aug. 30, 2026 posted an AI-made video of "Kharg Island being blown to smithereens," which Lead Stories fact-checked as not real. NBC found the videos often originate with other accounts and are promoted by Trump.
DOCUMENTED as an absence of evidence: the Old Goat found no reporting that Truth Social keeps a public political-ad library or labels AI content. Organic posts by the President are not ads, so no ad library on any platform would capture them even if one existed. This is the structural point. The disclosure regimes the Old Goat can see, state laws and platform policies, are built around paid ads. Meta's February 2026 midterms post says it requires advertisers to disclose AI in certain political ads and keeps political ads in its library for seven years. The most powerful political voice in the country distributes AI content by free posting, where none of that applies.
What the Old Goat Thinks It Means
This part is opinion, labeled as opinion. The record so far runs in layers. Cambridge Analytica was a vendor paid through the campaign filings. Its successors are vendors with AI branding paid through the same filings and, as of this July, through a White House contract. The ad libraries are the layer meant to show the output, and an ordinary citizen cannot search them in bulk. The Old Goat's INFERENCE is that nobody designed that gap for this purpose, and that it works in the interest of whoever benefits from persuasion nobody can easily audit. The Old Goat does not claim to know that the administration is doing what Cambridge Analytica did with newer tools. The Old Goat claims that the instruments that would let the public find out are weakest exactly where the President speaks.
Counter-evidence, plainly: the Wesleyan data show AI use is spread across candidates of both parties, with Democrats in the examples too (Democratic state senator Scott Wiener launched an AI chatbot about his opponent and withdrew it, and Al Jazeera lists AI ads about Democrats Sherrod Brown and James Talarico without saying who made them). Meta and Google do have disclosure rules. No source found says any White House or Trump committee ad was made by an AI persuasion vendor.
What Would Change This
The Old Goat will seek a researcher's or journalist's export of the Meta and Google libraries for MAGA Inc., Trump committees, the RNC, DHS and the White House, and will report the counts whatever they show. A hit on the vendors in the observation list would move this up. An empty result will be reported as an empty result.
A transparency tool you cannot query is a promise, not a record.
The Old Goat will update this dispatch as new filings arrive, and welcomes corrections to any figure above.