EarlyAd: A System for Real-Time Surveillance of Brazilian Early Electoral Ads on Twitter

The sheer volume of social media data produced daily brings challenges to the surveillance and detection of specific actions of interest, notably actions associated with infringement of regulations or laws in force in specific countries. One such case is the sharing of early electoral advertisement (ads), which is prohibited by law during political elections in Brazil. In this paper, we introduce EarlyAd, a system that performs, in real time, the collection, identification and analysis of early electoral advertisements on Twitter. Our tool was designed to bring more transparency and awareness to the Brazilian society about such practice, uncovering common patterns associated with this kind of content, while also offering competent authorities evidence to facilitate law enforcement. Our tool is running online and it is available at: http://earlyad.dcc.ufmg.br.