Google just erased 7 years of our political history

Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting - on YouTube, on Search and for display ads - for countless elections across 27 countries - is all gone.

We had been told that Google would try to stop people placing political ads, a "ban" that was to come into effect this week. I did not read anywhere that this would mean the erasure of this archive of our political history.

When you go to the Google Ad Archive (which you can here: https://adstransparency.google.com/) until last week you could search all political ads shown in your country by a date range of your choosing going back to 2018. You could browse all the ads in that range, or search for keywords, candidates, parties. You could view each ad - watch the video, see the images - who had been targeted, how much had been spent etc.

Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below):

The page you are diverted too if you try to find political ads on Google.

The political ad archive - now deleted? - allowed people like me (and many others) to understand what happened in elections, like this longer piece I was able to write during the European & Local elections last year on the use of YouTube by a far right party, Sinn Féin's big push on search result ads, and the growth of attacks ads in Ireland:

Now you need the specific name of an advertiser, and when I looked for, for example, "Sinn Fein", it (a) only gave me the option of searching for their website, and (b) showed zero results. This is despite Sinn Fein spending upwards of €10k a day during some of the elections last year.

Google no longer share any data on Irish political party and candidate spending on political ads on their platform; as shown here, a search for "Sinn Fein" returns "no ads found"

Some good things have been written about the impact that an ad "ban" might have on campaigning, especially when the algorithm still dominates all major social platforms (see this great piece by the Civil Liberties Union for Europe),

But the ad archives were introduced 7 years ago for a reason - in no small part because of the chaos of the Brexit and Trump 2016 votes, and our own advocacy here in Ireland about interference in the 2018 8th amendment referendum.

They were introduced to allow for scrutiny of campaigns, and also to provide a historical record so we could go back and look at what had been promised, and what had been spent, and to see if this lined up with what happened later.

This erasure of our political past feels dangerous, for scrutiny, for accountability, for shared memory, for enforcement of our rules - for our democracy.