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Facebook is the frontline of the digital campaign. In the 2015 General Election, 拢1.2m was spent by political parties on social media - and Facebook got more than 99% of that, according to the Electoral Commission.

In 2017, it will be just as crucial. The Conservatives outspent Labour 10-to-one on Facebook two years ago; Labour have pledged to bridge that gap.

And this election is the last opportunity for no-holds-barred digital campaigning.

After 2015, the Electoral Commission proposed that, at the 2020 election, parties should record all their spending on social media, with the aim of "providing greater transparency on campaigner's activity and provide a fuller understanding of how technology is changing traditional campaign activities".

Theresa May's surprise election means that won't happen this time, so the digital campaign remains murky at best.

"It's a Wild West," says Will Critchlow, chief executive of digital consultancy Distilled. "There's no insight and there's no oversight."

So we've launched an experiment - The Invisible Election - to try and reveal the digital techniques used by political campaigns.

Facebook's main appeal is its ability to micro-target voters and deliver them tailored messages - at the same time as keeping those messages away from others.

Mr Critchlow told Sky News: "What you aren't seeing in the political space is the extent to which those messages are hyper-targeted, hyper-local. If you live in a major city you're not going to see the way they're targeting people in rural areas; if you live in England, you're not going to see the way they're targeting people in Scotland."

To show how targeting works, we've launched a simulated campaign for our candidate, Votey McVoteface.

Targeting can be as specific as you like. Along with age and gender, you can select location - down to the postcode, or even a one kilometre radius.

Then there are interests - where Facebook excels - based on things you have liked, or from what Facebook has inferred.

The level of detail here can be ridiculously specific. Take "cake". You can target people by cake, cupcake, pancake, cheesecake, birthday cake, cake decorating, and so on. That's fairly innocuous.

But maybe you recently uploaded your wedding photos to your profile. It is possible to target "newlyweds on Facebook" according to how long ago they have been married - one year, six months, or three months. Then you can throw in "pregnancy" on top, if you like. And from there, parties pitch policies that will appeal to that group, from housing to child care.

"I think we do have to realise it's effective," Mr Critchlow says. "Companies wouldn't be spending their money advertising here if it didn't change people's mind about what product to buy. I'm absolutely certain that it's capable of changing people's mind, at the margin, about who to vote for.

"I think that there are threats to the democratic process."

We've targeted four different groups of people - factory workers in Sunderland, university students in Bristol, retirees in Sevenoaks and young professionals in east London - with four very different (non-political) messages, to show how the political parties do it.

Then there are the other - slightly dirtier - digital techniques.

Retargeting is a staple of online marketing. If you have ever been followed around the internet by an advert for a pair of jeans, you've been retargeted using cookies.

According to Mr Critchlow, it is useful for getting the vote out among your supporters.

But it could be used more sneakily. You could create a fake page designed to attract your opponents - something dressed up as an editorial - and use that to plant cookies in their browsers, then deliver attack adverts. Again, your supporters would never see the practice.

Or how about "rankslurs"? That is the idea of creating damaging websites designed to appear in Google's search rankings for your opponents. Google Rick Santorum, a former US senator, to see how that can work out.

Lastly, there's impersonation: pretending to be a candidate's staffer or aide on Twitter, then expressing plausible but damaging opinions.

All these techniques are available not just to parties, but interested third parties. We'll explore them and more - including botnets and misinformation - over the remaining weeks of the election.

We will track our simulated campaigns during the election - let us know if you come across the adverts in the wild - and any other online shenanigans by emailing invisibleelection@AG百家乐在线官网.uk or tweeting @SkyNews with the hashtag #InvisibleElection.

Hopefully, together, we can make the invisible election a little more visible.