In October 2019, TikTok banned political advertising on its services, preventing parties and candidates from reaching voters through paid content, even via influencer promotions. (1) On the face of it, a ban on political ads may seem like a good idea. With so many instances of campaigns misusing ads by spreading lies and abusing data […]
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 […]
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, […]
We’ve been using data, now published publicly by Facebook via their Ad Library, to try and better understand how campaigns are targeting their ads for the midterms. We’ve done this in two ways, using data from the last three months. First, we’ve built a map of the US, state-by-state, showing how and where Democratic (i.e. […]
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 […]
The story so far… We have always wanted Who Targets Me to be available to anyone who sees political ads and is interested in where they come from, why they see them, and what they can do to help democracy face up to the many challenges of the digital age. That’s why we’ve tried to […]
The Swedish election results are coming out. It’s very close – one seat either way could make the difference. As with all close elections, campaigns matter. Digital campaigns are an important part of that. And the use of digital ads are a piece of that. Let’s start with looking at the use of Facebook/Instagram ads […]
We spent the day in Brussels yesterday talking with policymakers and organisations who are working on the forthcoming EU Regulation on Political Ads. Overall, the Regulation is heading in broadly the right direction (more transparency and verification, some limitation on methods), but there’s a few course corrections needed and places where it could be improved. […]