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Without urgent reforms, online political advertising will remain a dangerous wild west

4 min read

With local elections just weeks away and a general election guaranteed in the next eighteen months, the UK is once again woefully unprepared for the campaigning battle that is already playing out on social media.

Broadcast media has long been highly regulated when it comes to political advertisements. Leaflets are a mainstay of British politics. They can, of course, pose risks, with parties and candidates spreading disinformation. Still, the analog nature of a physical piece of paper means their reach is ultimately limited, with both transparency and a right to reply inherent to paper-based campaigning literature because of its public nature.

Political advertising online, however, is a completely different story. Because of the ability to use personal data to target ads, if done well online adverts should only be seen by people who are likely to be sympathetic to their message. There is nothing public about highly targeted ads. While Facebook says they maintain a public ad library, £7.4 million worth of ad spending disappeared for more than 24 hours just ahead of the 2019 Election. Without transparency it is impossible to have an open democratic debate, making targeted online political ads inherently undemocratic.

I had a front-row seat to the unfolding of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and have seen up close and personal the damaging impact of social media on democracy. The only thing social media companies care about is maximising engagement because that’s how they maximise ad sales. Thiat incentive model has led to algorithms that favour more extreme, divisive content no matter the consequences, driving people further and further into information bubbles that may or not resemble the real world. This breakdown of shared reality online is increasingly obvious in our everyday lives, with serious offline effects including the insurrection at the US Capitol and attacks on journalists here in the UK.

I consulted on one of the provisions in the Government’s recently passed Elections Bill, which will require imprints on some digital adverts. These new imprint rules, however, fall woefully short of what is needed to curb the flow of disinformation in our elections. The threshold is set at including in imprint in the material only if it is “reasonably practicable,” and not, as I advised at the time, “impossible.” This threshold is not only highly subjective, it completely misunderstands how disinformation spreads online, with screenshots, memification and repurposing a common method of “going viral”.

Neither the Elections Bill nor the Online Safety Bill introduces any duties relating to accuracy of information shared. This is despite 2020 YouGov research showing that 85% of the UK public say they agree it is important “that political parties’ adverts do not make false or misleading claims”. We’re constantly exposed to examples of why this is needed. From the Conservatives’ 2019 stunt of renaming their party-political Twitter handle “factcheckUK” during a debate to the recent misleading Labour party ads that grossly misrepresent Rishi Sunak, we must expect a constant onslaught of online activity right through to the next General Election. The argument goes that there shouldn’t be an arbiter of truth and yet perhaps what is more worrying is that we somehow as a society no longer know the difference.

In the private sector, the UK has the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA is an “independent regulator of advertising across all media”. From food companies making untrue claims about the health benefits of their products to ensuring airlines don’t make misleading claims about the environmental impact of their flights, the public can trust that the ASA will ensure there is truth in commercial advertising, with no such mandate for regulating what political parties tell us.

The best way to reign in this wild west would be to follow broadcast and ban political advertising online alrogether. At the very least, however, we need urgent reforms to limit microtargeting of ads based on personal data, create a publicly available political adverts library and empower a truly independent regulator to ensure the public can have faith in the information political parties are sharing offline and online. After all, doesn’t our democracy deserve the same care and consideration as an ad for skin cream?

Kyle Taylor is the author of new book The Little Black Book of Social Media

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