Meta “bans” political ads in the EU
Last night - a Friday night, in July - Meta announced that it would “no longer allow political, electoral and social issue ads on our platforms in the EU in response to new regulation”.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was that scene from The Office where Michael Scott screams “I. DECLARE. BANKRUPTCY”, believing that simply shouting those words will absolve him of the big oul mess he has created for himself.
Because social media platforms cannot actually ban political ads. If you run a major global online space where people go to be entertained and informed, and you sell access to those people via paid ads, there will be people who use it - one way or another - to influence opinions, attitudes, policy outcomes, and elections.
Declaring that you no longer allow political ads simply means that you are abdicating responsibility, you’re trying to wash your hands of the sorry mess you have created (and benefit from). It means that you can dismantle or fail to invest in the infrastructure that regulators, media, watchdogs and the public need in order to ensure that electoral finance rules are upheld, that illegal foreign interference is detected, and that bad actors are identified and exposed.
”Banning ads” means that legitimate actors will likely not use the platform, while bad actors, who don’t give two hoots about platform rules, will find ways to influence people.
Then one of two things will happen - the ads will no longer be filtered into an archive, and so will vanish, or if they are found (which will likely be by civil society, either volunteering or using precious grant funding, because platforms are crap / lazy at comprehensively detecting this stuff, especially outside Anglophone North America), it will be erased and redacted from the public record.
We know this because it is the approach TikTok took/ takes. They “ban” political ads, and therefore have no infrastrucure to detect them. Yet I found plenty of ads running during our local and European Parliament elections last year (as I wrote about here:)
Liz Carolan
I reported this to Coimisiún na Meán in the form of a DSA complaint; TikTok’s reply was so unsatisfactory that CnaM agreed to pursue the case, before eventually throwing it in with the EU’s broader investigation into the platform. (You can read a GDoc version of that complaint here, and a screenshot of the summary is below)
And what happened to the ads I found? Redacted; gone from the public record; just ghostly redacted outlines remaining;
This, it turned out, was the tip of the iceberg; the level of political interference of TikTok in the Romanian elections held a few months later was so high, that the country had to cancel the poll all together - as I wrote about here:
Liz Carolan
The most galling thing about Meta’s announcement is that it explicitly says that it is taking this cop out because complying with new EU rules that are due to come into force in October would come “at significant cost”. YOU MADE $164 BILLION LAST YEAR.
And, as political ad guru and former Facebooker Clare O’Donoghue Velikić said on LinkedIn last night:
Political ads in the EU have never made them enough money to be financially worth the effort, but there were days when we were proud that Meta was helping mainstream political parties and campaigners to reach voters in fair and well-regulated ways, because it was good for democracy and the world as a whole.
Clearly Meta have decided the effort to follow the laws of democracy is no longer worth it, unless the ads turn US-style profit.
Shame on them.
And can I just say (as I try to write this on an iPad loaded with Bluey episodes for the holiday I am trying to take) - a Friday night in July? They knew what they were doing. (Google announced the same policy months ago)
Maybe the Presidential election in October, likely the first major election under these rules, might be interesting after all…
ICYMI:
Liz Carolan
Liz Carolan
Liz Carolan
