Policy

Digital campaigning isn’t new at this point, but it’s still newer than most of the electoral law that governs it. We think it’s time that changed. The next government should take a step back and do the work needed to improve the rules for British election campaigns in the digital age. Here’s 10 things they…

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.

TikTok’s prohibition on political advertising creates unacknowledged winners and losers. When you weigh those up, their ban seems to favour a certain Donald J. Trump.

This morning, signatories of the 2022 EU Code of Practice on Disinformation published their first reports under the new Code. The voluntary document, which was completed in June last year, signed platforms up to a range of measures designed to counter online disinformation, including commitments around improving the transparency of political advertising.  The 20+ signatories…

Printed election campaign materials published in the UK must contain information about who is responsible for producing them. This information is known as an ‘imprint’. These can help voters understand who is attempting to influence their political beliefs, giving additional context to campaigning material not just in the run up to an election, but between…