Policy

  • What are we to do about microtargeting?

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    (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…

  • Why political Facebook ads are the most interesting political ads ever

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    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…

  • What Google’s targeting ban has meant in practice

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    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…

  • How to turn off political ads on Facebook

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    Facebook introduces a ‘kill switch’ for political advertising in the US. Over the past five years we’ve seen a massive increase in the level of political advertising through digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google. Alongside legitimate campaigning, thanks to a lack of oversight, it’s also become the perfect place to seed disinformation and manipulate…

  • Ten simple ideas to regulate online political advertising in the UK

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    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…

  • How to fact check political ads

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    Recently, we published ‘10 ideas for regulating political ads’ (which you might want to read before you read this). One idea that some argue for that we don’t agree with is having a regulator fact check them. In the heat of an election campaign, we don’t think it’s sustainable or desirable for a regulator, no…