Policy

  • Is the EU Parliament’s ban on ads targeted using “special category” data a pyrrhic victory?

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    Last week, the EU Parliament backed an amendment to the Digital Services Act that banned the use of “special category” data “for the purpose of displaying advertising”. If the ban is enacted (the other arms of the EU must agree first), no digital platform or service will be allowed to sell ads targeted at people…

  • The UK party political case for regulating online political advertising

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    To start this post with something fancy, let’s go back to Thucydides (an ancient Greek historian). He wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” For what it’s worth, this is pretty much the root of realist political thought. Everything’s a power game, where…

  • “Troll farms” and political ads

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    MIT Technology Review yesterday reported a story about how ‘troll farms’ (probably better described as ‘profiteering content spammers’) copy and repost content to gain (a lot of) traction on Facebook. The spammers’ strategy gamed the way the company chooses to display content to users, ensuring their posts got lots of engagement, before racking up even…

  • The Ray-Ban political ad library

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    Last week, Ray-Ban, in collaboration with Facebook, launched glasses that take photos and videos, and have little speakers in the arms for playing podcasts and the like (via Bluetooth – the glasses don’t have standalone network connectivity just yet). The speakers are “discreetly” built into the arms, so you can walk around, listening away, without…

  • How Facebook could publish targeting information and preserve user privacy

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    Ever since Facebook first started publishing political ad data in 2018, many organisations, including ourselves, have called for them to include information about ad targeting. So far, there’s been no movement on this, with Facebook arguing there’s a privacy risk if this data is combined with data from other parts of Facebook.  Here’s what (we…

  • Why (and how) the UK Online Safety Bill should regulate political ads

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    The UK Government’s proposed Online Safety Bill doesn’t currently include any measures that cover political advertising. However, we think that, being platform-focused, it’s actually a really good place to address some of the platform-level risks that online political ads create. (Other future legislation can think about those risks from the perspective of campaigners). So we…