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. […]
Facebook has announced some new measures they’re taking for housing ads in the US. It’s an interesting topic, with the potential for wider repercussions. Let’s unpick it. Basically (to summarise the legal settlement they made with the US government), Facebook is making changes because there’s (at the very least) the potential for bias in the […]
No. We get it. People are pissed off at politicians. One in particular. So why shouldn’t we regulate political ads to make sure they’re truthful? Here’s 11 reasons why not: Someone adjudicating for truth in political advertising must be very, very impartial. But who’s very, very impartial when it comes to politics? Is the BBC […]
[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 […]
The UK has a parliamentary system with 650 seats, representing 650 distinct geographically bounded constituencies. Each seat elects an MP. An MP wins if they get more votes than anyone else from voters in their constituency. The party with the most MPs forms the government. That party leader becomes Prime Minister. But you know all […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Fabio Votta. There are less than 10 days left until the German parliamentary elections and the campaigns are picking up steam by heavily increasing their spending. Between August 30th and September 13th, 2021 Who Targets Me users saw over 12,000 political ads in their timelines. We can use the data they provide us with […]
MIT Technology Review yesterday reported a story about how ‘troll farms’ (probably better described as ‘profiteering content spammers’) copy and repost content to gain (a lot of) traction on Facebook. The spammers’ strategy gamed the way the company chooses to display content to users, ensuring their posts got lots of engagement, before racking up even […]