Across Europe, strict rules apply to how traditional media operates during elections. Often, that means creating a period of silence so voters can reflect on their choices without being unduly influenced. In France, for example, public opinion polls are not allowed to be released on election day.
However, there are few laws regulating the actions of social media companies in relation to elections. This is a problem now that political parties are campaigning on these platforms as a matter of course.
This year, the European Commission plans to introduce regulations on political advertising that will apply across EU member states.
To understand why such measures are being considered, let’s look at recent worrying practices during election cycles in the UK and the US.
As more people consume news online and advertising revenue moves online, social media poses a major threat to fair and transparent elections.
The largest social media networks are commercial enterprises. The company provides marketing services to other companies that want to advertise their products to the right network users.
To facilitate this, social media companies collect and store behavioral data about our activities: what we click, why we hit the “like” button, and the comments we leave. .
Knowing these things about each individual gives these companies a detailed understanding of their users. This is great for identifying which user segments are most receptive to a particular message or ad.
User Marketplace
Social media companies typically use in-house artificial intelligence bidding systems that operate in real-time on each page shown to users. Businesses compete for customer access by telling them how much they will pay to advertise, and algorithms choose what and where to display on the page.
This ingenious model was originally devised by Google and has fundamentally changed the world of marketing. This model is called surveillance capitalism because the basis of this model is the collection of each person’s behavioral activities on a platform for marketing purposes.
All of this is important enough if we are being sold a product, but using such information in the context of an election campaign is even more questionable.
A new level of AI, surveillance, and business cooperation was achieved when Facebook began offering services to companies involved in political campaigns. Of particular concern was his activity regarding the use of custom audience targeting in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the US presidential election in the same year.
To this day, it is unclear how these activities influenced voting, but companies have collaborated to gather voter information and, among other things, to use computer-generated and efficient We know that they used personality judgments to perform their own behavioral analysis on segments of interest. We collected Facebook profiles. Persuasive materials were then delivered to users at specific times by Facebook.
Enlightening information provided by Facebook to a UK parliamentary inquiry reveals that many of the mass ads it sent to users about Brexit were misleading and relied on debatable half-truths. found.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has slapped Facebook with an unprecedented $5 billion (€4.6 billion) fine for misleading users and allowing them to share their profiles with business app developers.
In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: The good news is that the most important actions to prevent something like this from happening again today were already taken years ago. But we made mistakes and we still have work to do and we need to step up and do it. ”
But the EU is clearly not satisfied with Facebook’s promise that something like this won’t happen again, and plans to take a tougher approach than before.
My own research in this area has shown that business projects that use advanced AI with behavioral analysis to influence elections can be seen as artificial humans working and are not able to influence elections. They argue that they should be regulated in the same way as humans who seek to give them.
european approach
There is currently no common definition available for political advertising. Therefore, the EU needs to provide a definition that does not infringe on freedom of expression and allows the market to be properly regulated.
With this in mind, it is expected that the law will mention that there is a link between payment and the use or creation of a post. This allows us to differentiate between advertisements and personal opinions shared on social media.
Once a political ad is identified, the law requires it to be clearly labeled as related to a specific election or referendum. The name of the sponsor and the amount spent on advertising must be made clear.
A key issue with the US and UK scandals was the use of amplification technology on Facebook where political ads were most effectively displayed.
This meant using potentially sensitive information about individuals, such as ethnic origin, psychological profiling, religious beliefs, and sexual orientation, to classify them into targeted groups. In EU countries this is not allowed unless people explicitly allow it.
Until now, political advertisements have been distributed in private spaces and not available to the public. A new European law aims to place all political advertising in a public repository, subject to public scrutiny and regulation.
The European Commission wants these regulations to come into force by the 2024 European elections. Applying the regulations accurately is difficult, and the European Commission is in the final stages of discussions on the issue. Political advertising will be regulated in some way, making it more possible to hold social media companies accountable.