The Facebook election battle is in full swing, the Bureau can reveal, with at least 68 different types of political adverts tailored to individual social media users being paid for by the three main parties in the last month.

The Bureau has been given access to the first dataset ever collected that shows how UK voters are being targeted with specific messages in an attempt to influence their vote.

The shadowy world of online political advertising has until now gone largely unmonitored, despite the huge power and reach of Facebook and despite social media messaging being thought to have contributed to the Donald Trump and the Vote Leave victories.

A new project called Who Targets Me is attempting to address this, by recruiting social media users to share information on what adverts they are seeing. The Bureau’s new data journalism team the Bureau Local will analyse the data collected in an attempt to shed light on an opaque and rapidly growing industry.