Political advertising before Zambia's 2026 election

1. The transparency archive is mostly opaque where it matters

Of the 1,415 domestic political ads that reached Zambian users, 84%have their creative content withheld in Meta's own transparency archive — overwhelmingly because the ads ran without the political disclaimer Meta requires (891 ads). The majority of paid political messaging that reached voters ran outside the platform's compliance regime, and the public record shows a removal notice where the message used to be.

2. Disclosure is improving fast — from zero

The share of domestic political ads carrying a disclosed funding entity has climbed steeply through the campaign:

Whether this reflects stricter platform enforcement or better campaign compliance cannot be determined from the archive alone — but the accountability record for the early campaign barely exists.

3. The issue agenda: process and personality beat policy

Among the 201ads whose text survives in the archive, the two dominant themes are not issues at all: they are the election itself (turnout, registration) and candidate personality. Among policy topics, infrastructure leads, followed by jobs & youth and education. Health barely registers. Corruption is the one topic where attack ads outnumber promotional ones — in Zambian paid media it is a weapon, not a platform.

4. Who is advertising

Disclosed spending is small and concentrated. The largest attributable advertisers:

Read this with care

• Message analysis covers only the ads whose text Meta did not withhold — the compliant slice. The withheld majority could read very differently.
• Spend figures are midpoints of Meta's reported ranges, not actuals.
• Classification (domestic vs foreign, actor attribution, topics) is model-assisted with measured accuracy of 86–99% depending on the task — see methodology.
• The archive itself is unstable: we have observed advertiser footprints shrink between pulls. Our append-only snapshots may preserve records the archive no longer shows.