Policy

  • Google quits political ads in the EU – a quick reaction

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    In March, the EU adopted the text of a new regulation on political ads, designed to promote transparency and close off the period since 2016 where there’s been significant public and media concern about their misuse. The «final» regulation wasn’t very final, serving more as a framework than a specific set of requirements, with much…

  • Why didn’t AI ‘happen’ in 2024’s elections?

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    Dire predictions about deepfakes damaging elections in 2024 turned out to be a long way off the mark. The predictions mostly came from two camps. The first was politics people who don’t really understand technology. The second was technology people, particularly AI people, who don’t understand political campaigns. The reality was, for problematic generative AI…

  • Extending what the Who Targets Me browser extension does

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    Since 2017, Who Targets Me has focused on improving transparency in political advertising on Facebook, the dominant platform for paid online political messaging. With the help of the thousands of volunteers, who have donated their data, we’ve had a significant impact in how that platform implements transparency, and how policymakers have crafted new digital regulations.…

  • How Labour should improve digital campaign rules

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    During the election campaign, British political parties and candidates handed £1 million a week to Meta and Google – two of the richest technology companies in the world – to target social media ads at millions of voters. By the time the polls closed, UK voters had seen over two billion digital political ads during…

  • Disinformation ads, Systemic Risks and the Digital Services Act

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    In the middle of 2023, in our research of political ads in Germany, we started to come across pages and ads in Meta’s Ad Library with names like “Clever Music Bistro”, “Bold Health Garden” and “Adventurous Dogs Blog”. Each would have run a single ad, usually including a newspaper-style cartoon featuring a European leader, or…

  • UK campaign analysis: 19th-25th June

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    In the final push, Parties are spending more than ever on Meta. Spend on the platform is at its highest yet since the campaign began. In the 19 – 25 June period, weekly spend was £1,313,442: outperforming even the first two-weeks of the campaign, when more than £1M was spent each week. As we enter…