Policy

  • 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…

  • The Ad Transparency ”Triple Decker”

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    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…

  • About the Conservatives ”Support The Brexit Deal” ads

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    On 29th November, the Conservatives launched 152 ads about Brexit. They are promoting seven different videos, each with a  slightly different angle on the proposed deal. All have the same call to action – for people to visit https://www.backthebrexitdeal.com and email their MP, asking them to support the Prime Minister’s deal next week. On 30th November, they…

  • Dark ads are finally dead

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    Some things that have been bubbling along for a while moved forward last week. First, Facebook and Twitter launched new ad transparency initiatives. You can now view the ads that accounts are running. ‘Dark ads’ are dead. Neither implementation is perfect. Discovery is still hard (you don’t know what you’re looking for, particularly for campaigns…