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 election cycles, too.
Until recently, laws requiring imprints only applied to printed political material, as well as some digital election material used in Scottish elections. However, under the Elections Act 2022, imprints are now required on several kinds of electronic political material, including social media posts, podcast ads, and even messages sent on services like Whatsapp and Telegram.
May’s local elections will be the first where these new rules will be in place.
What might a digital imprint look like?
Digital imprints will look different depending on the medium used to publish the content, but they must contain the name and address of the person or organisation that produced the content. For visual content, an imprint must be included in text form as part of the material or, if not practical, be directly accessible from the post.
For instance, if you can’t include an imprint in a tweet due to the character limit, you must post the imprint in the account’s bio, so it can be directly accessed by the user. For audio content, an imprint can be embedded in audio form.
What types of political content will require a digital imprint?
Digital imprints will need to be included on all paid political adverts and any non-paid (organic) election-related material from registered political entities. This means that, even if a political party or candidate does not pay for their content to be published as an ad, they will still be required to include an imprint when they share it online if it is related to an election, referendum or recall petition. For paid adverts, anyone, regardless of whether they are registered as a political entity or not, will need to include an imprint if the content is political material.
What constitutes political material? What are the challenges of this definition?
The Electoral Commission defines political material as digital material whose primary purpose is intended to influence the public to support (or withhold support from) a political party, candidate or referendum. Notably, determining whether the primary purpose of a piece of content is political or not may not always be clear cut, and there will likely be many scenarios where content contains political undertones but has a different primary purpose. For instance, in an example given by the Electoral Commission, a comedian uploading a sponsored post of a routine criticising a government minister would not need an imprint, because the primary purpose of the clip is reasonably regarded as being to promote the comedian. Here, it is easy to imagine how it might be possible to reclassify content as non-political by presenting it as having a different primary purpose. This might leave some room for political actors to evade the need for digital imprints, should they wish to try. Given the narrow definition of what constitutes political material, there may well be instances of paid political content escaping the remit of this law.
Imprints in action
The new rules will be in operation from November 2023 (see note). Any content, paid or not, published by registered political entities about the local elections will need an imprint. As with any new rules, it’s possible there will be instances of campaigners failing to include imprints on their material.
Particularly, this could occur when people share political content. When sharing content that already contains an imprint, or a link to an imprint, political candidates might be unaware of the need to ensure that the imprint is also included on their re-shared post, such as a retweet, screenshot or Facebook share.
It is unclear at this early stage how breaking this law would be dealt with in reality, but the Elections Act gives the police and Electoral Commission enforcement powers to require posters to take down material and impose civil sanctions.
Conclusion: Are imprints enough?
Though the definition of political material in this act may not be sufficient to capture all digital political content, this Act does bring digital requirements in line with those for printed material. However, given the unique capabilities of online ads, an imprint alone isn’t sufficient to help users understand how campaigns operate. Further, future legislation will need to focus on ensuring voters can always easily access further details about online political material, such as targeting criteria, money spent, engagement and reach
Note: An earlier version of this post stated they’d be in action for the May local elections in 2023. They won’t be. The first elections these will definitely affect are the May 2024 elections (local + mayoral).
Sources
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/37/contents/enacted