During the election campaign, British political parties and candidates handed £1 million a week to Meta and Google – two of the richest technology companies in the world – to target social media ads at millions of voters. By the time the polls closed, UK voters had seen over two billion digital political ads during the campaign.
The rules that govern digital campaigning are scant and outdated. British electoral law lives in the analogue past, designed to create something of a level playing field between campaigns that knock on doors, deliver leaflets and post ads on bus stops.
With a thousand targeted Facebook or YouTube ads often costing less than £5 (versus £1.35 for a single first class stamp on a letter to a voter), parties have completely re-engineered their campaigns around the much cheaper services offered by the giant US tech platforms, where you can reach massive online audiences by going viral, or specific ones with targeted ads. In short, the old rules aren’t fit for the digital age.
We started Who Targets Me because we believe better political ad transparency is critical if voters are to properly interrogate the things politicians say to them to make informed choices about who they elect. It deters bad actors, such as foreign governments, from meddling in elections. It increases the costs of lying for those who choose to do it. It ensures we can see if rules are being broken during campaigns, rather than months or years afterwards. The current rules – a patchwork of laws designed in the late 1990s to cover print material – coupled with private laws dreamt up in California by giant tech companies, suffer from glaring inconsistencies and gaps which prevent that from happening.
Over the last parliament, we saw tweaks to election laws such as the introduction of voter ID, “digital imprints” (tiny fragments of text on social media posts or accounts that tell us who paid for them) as well as a major increase in election spending limits.
Labour is introducing a new Democracy Bill, to include further changes such as lowering the voting age to 16, automatic voter registration and improving the way voter ID works. Some of these are welcome ideas, but none address the massive role that technology now plays in our elections.
There are several problems that need to be solved.
First, we need to take back control from Google and Meta – the two largest platforms used by UK political parties during the 2017, 2019, and now 2024 campaigns. Both profit handsomely from British elections. At the very least, voters should get something in return. Earlier this year, the EU introduced transparency requirements for how large platforms should treat political advertising. These new rules will ensure a consistent approach to transparency that makes it easier for voters, journalists and researchers to understand what’s being said to whom, and how much is being spent to do it. The UK can do the same.
Secondly, targeted digital ads are eroding the separation between national and local campaigning. Party HQs now routinely focus their digital ads on individual postcodes in key marginals from offices hundreds of miles away, never mentioning their candidate (which would count as local spending, and would be very restricted). All of the main parties have skirted local limits in this way with their digital ads, running huge numbers of them in target constituencies without ever tripping over the spending ceilings set out by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (2000). British elections are national, yes, but they’re also the combination of 650 smaller local elections, and spending rules exist to try and maintain this balance, so that local and independent voices can be heard. The balance needs to be re-found.
The third problem is the spending limits themselves, which are too high, and are only really attainable by the two largest parties. The primary form of campaigning – digital – is getting cheaper, but the spending limits have been doubled. Although Labour won under the current rules, it should take the benevolent view and look again at the real cost of campaigning, as well as how campaigns are funded, and work with the other parties to create a fairer system that treats voters with dignity and respect. The new government should also close the current loophole that allows parties to buy virtually unlimited numbers of ads on election day, without any accountability, while the media are forced to be silent.
Finally, digital campaigning has made elections nastier. According to our analysis of Facebook and Instagram ads across the recent campaign, just seven of 2,609 ads run by the Tories mentioned their policy plans. The rest attacked Labour, or warned people against voting for Reform or the Liberal Democrats. New ideas, such as a voluntary code of conduct for digital political campaigns, should encourage parties to communicate with voters more substantively about their plans, rather than simply stoking fears of what their opponents might do. Voluntary action via a code might seem weak compared to hard law, but it would create a floor of better behaviour, and would be much less burdensome than inventing and resourcing a regulator who would immediately be put in the impossible position of refereeing political fights.
The internet isn’t necessarily bad for elections, but successive governments, mostly Conservative, have done nothing to acknowledge its role and write new rules make it work better for our elections. The task for the next government is to create election campaign rules fit for the digital age, that treat voters as grown ups and result in fairer behaviour and outcomes.