Policy

  • PATA – The Little Act That Could…

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    The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) is a bill drafted by a bipartisan group of US Senators to increase the transparency of social media data. Initially released as a discussion draft in December 2021, and formally introduced as a bill in December 2022, PATA contains several mechanisms designed to enable greater independent scrutiny of…

  • ChatGPT and the future of political ads

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    With all the ChatGPT hype this week, it’s a good time to think about a prospective future for AI that has it producing deeply personalised information and communication. For political ads, a tool like ChatGPT could write and design (or film or assemble) thousands of variations of political ads based on desired topic, emotional pitch,…

  • Political ad blackouts, ’greyouts’ and dealing with ’unaccountable information’

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    Today, Meta (in the US) stops new political ads being created ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections. Ads will still run on Facebook and Instagram – lots of them – but they’ll have been created in the past, and won’t respond to new events that might happen before the election. We think ad blackouts are…

  • Regulating political ad systems (not just political ads)

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    We spent the day in Brussels yesterday talking with policymakers and organisations who are working on the forthcoming EU Regulation on Political Ads. Overall, the Regulation is heading in broadly the right direction (more transparency and verification, some limitation on methods), but there’s a few course corrections needed and places where it could be improved.…

  • Facebook is trying to take the bias out of US housing ads. Will it have to do the same for EU political ads?

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    Facebook has announced some new measures they’re taking for housing ads in the US. It’s an interesting topic, with the potential for wider repercussions. Let’s unpick it. Basically (to summarise the legal settlement they made with the US government), Facebook is making changes because there’s (at the very least) the potential for bias in the…

  • Should you have a truth regulator for political ads?

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    No. We get it. People are pissed off at politicians. One in particular. So why shouldn’t we regulate political ads to make sure they’re truthful? Here’s 11 reasons why not: Lying is a problem in politics, but it’s one with some well-established solutions. Correcting the record is a job for journalists, fact checkers, opposing political…