We’re making online political ads more transparent

As our lives go more and more online, we must all acknowledge the key global role the internet (and more specifically, social media) plays in the conduct of politics.  To date, too little constructive action has taken place to reform the rules of democracy to account for this. Instead, interested parties hold their cards close and eye each other suspiciously…

(This blog post is the product of a series of conversations among EU-based civil society organisations on policy options related to political ads, transparency and microtargeting. Several organisations contributed policy ideas and this post summarises them below) There’s a lot of public concern about microtargeting and the threats to individual agency and democracy that it might pose. Campaigns now routinely…

There’s an argument that “political Facebook ads are just ads”. After 2016’s Brexit and Trump victories, when both campaigns made claim to being Facebook ad geniuses, using them to swing the result in their favour, it became important to take a look and see whether they were, in fact, more than “ads”. Over time, the reconstruction of those campaigns has…

In late 2019, Google banned some types of targeting for political ads. Specifically, they stopped allowing ads using ‘interest-based’ and ‘custom audience’ targeting (where the campaign collects or profiles a list of people, matches them to users on that platform and who are then shown ads). Instead, Google now limits political ads to targeting by age, geography (postcode, not radius),…