Policy

Meta will reinstate Donald Trump’s accounts in the next few days. Here are some of the implications of their decision, as we see them: 1/ He never truly went away. For the last two years, Meta has allowed the Trump campaign to run ads provided they weren’t from his account or using his tone or…

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…

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,…

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…

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 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…

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…

The UK has a parliamentary system with 650 seats, representing 650 distinct geographically bounded constituencies. Each seat elects an MP. An MP wins if they get more votes than anyone else from voters in their constituency. The party with the most MPs forms the government. That party leader becomes Prime Minister. But you know all…

[This statement has been lightly edited to help it read as a blog post, but is largely as originally written and delivered. Part of the context here is that the Belgian parliament is considering a range of options, including a ban, for dealing with online political ads. Another part was that the French election was…

Facebook’s most recent set of numbers look bad. They showed users aren’t flocking to the platform in the same way as in previous years. Perhaps they’ve reached saturation point in most markets or users find themselves turned off by the reports following Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing. Alongside this, advertisers are finding it harder to target those…