Policy

Around many stars there is a so-called “goldilocks zone” where the temperature is just right for a planet to enjoy liquid water, and (perhaps) to support life. We think political advertising on social media also has a goldilocks zone. If you allow too many ads, you give unscrupulous campaigns the ability to microtarget voters, tell…

It all comes from above.  During election campaigns, major parties and candidates get the vast majority of coverage. They reinforce this with paid communication – TV and social media ads – and “owned” communication – events, emails, organic social media and more. This combines to motivate the voters they want to get out, and suppress…

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…

(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…

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…

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…

Yesterday, the UK Advertising Standards Authority’s CEO Guy Parker published a piece outlining some of the challenges of regulating online political ads in the UK (challenges which are also broadly applicable to other democracies). We agree that it’s difficult to regulate the content of political ads. That’s why we don’t think it’s the answer to this problem. It’s…

Over the past couple of years, we’ve written and contributed to thinking about increasing political ad transparency, from a self-regulatory and regulatory perspective, but also from a technical perspective, where a precise description of what can help voters read and interpret political advertising is now significantly clearer. Gradually, in response to negative media coverage and…