Policy

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.