Policy

This morning, signatories of the 2022 EU Code of Practice on Disinformation published their first reports under the new Code. The voluntary document, which was completed in June last year, signed platforms up to a range of measures designed to counter online disinformation, including commitments around improving the transparency of political advertising.  The 20+ signatories…

Printed election campaign materials published in the UK must contain information about who is responsible for producing them. This information is known as an ‘imprint’. These can help voters understand who is attempting to influence their political beliefs, giving additional context to campaigning material not just in the run up to an election, but between…

Meta will reinstate Donald Trump’s accounts in the next few days. Here are some of the implications of their decision, as we see them: 1/ He never truly went away. For the last two years, Meta has allowed the Trump campaign to run ads provided they weren’t from his account or using his tone or…

The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) is a bill drafted by a bipartisan group of US Senators to increase the transparency of social media data. Initially released as a discussion draft in December 2021, and formally introduced as a bill in December 2022, PATA contains several mechanisms designed to enable greater independent scrutiny of…

With all the ChatGPT hype this week, it’s a good time to think about a prospective future for AI that has it producing deeply personalised information and communication. For political ads, a tool like ChatGPT could write and design (or film or assemble) thousands of variations of political ads based on desired topic, emotional pitch,…

Today, Meta (in the US) stops new political ads being created ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections. Ads will still run on Facebook and Instagram – lots of them – but they’ll have been created in the past, and won’t respond to new events that might happen before the election. We think ad blackouts are…