We’re making online political ads more transparent

[This statement has been lightly edited to help it read as a blog post, but is largely as originally written and delivered. Part of the context here is that the Belgian parliament is considering a range of options, including a ban, for dealing with online political ads. Another part was that the French election was imminent.] We’ll start by discussing…

Facebook’s most recent set of numbers look bad. They showed users aren’t flocking to the platform in the same way as in previous years. Perhaps they’ve reached saturation point in most markets or users find themselves turned off by the reports following Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing. Alongside this, advertisers are finding it harder to target those users because Apple has made…

Last week, the EU Parliament backed an amendment to the Digital Services Act that banned the use of “special category” data “for the purpose of displaying advertising”. If the ban is enacted (the other arms of the EU must agree first), no digital platform or service will be allowed to sell ads targeted at people based on their racial or…

To start this post with something fancy, let’s go back to Thucydides (an ancient Greek historian). He wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For what it’s worth, this is pretty much the root of realist political thought. Everything’s a power game, where marginal perceived or real advantages…