Policy

With thanks to Fabio Votta, who helps us aggregate party spending on different targeting methods. Here’s the first week of the campaign on Meta, broken down by the amount of money spent on the various targeting methods available to political advertisers. To produce the above chart, we aggregate the amount spent on each targeting method…

The UK is starting to diverge from the GDPR. What will looser rules mean for political campaigns?

What should platforms do to increase the integrity of their political advertising systems to protect the many elections taking this year?

The EU’s Digital Services Act is a big step forward in holding platforms accountable. On ad transparency, it could have gone further.

For researchers, processing video and images is hard. The files are large, processing them without powerful hardware is slow and, quite simply, you can’t watch them all. To make research possible, platform ad libraries should include video and audio transcripts as standard.

New laws should mean more clarity and some common standards about what’s “in scope” for ad transparency. In the meantime, the platforms get to choose their own approach. Google’s lazy effort at political ad transparency reflects this.