Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads – POLITICO.eu

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Facebook and Google will have to provide reams of detailed information on how political groups target people via online ads or face steep fines, according to European Commission draft proposals seen by POLITICO.

The proposals, which the Commission is expected to unveil on November 23, aim to protect elections from undisclosed political ads, stop political parties from misusing social media and combat the manipulation of voters through microtargeting the practice at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.

Brussels wants to boost transparency around online political ads by forcing partisan groups and the world's largest platforms to disclose more information about who is buying ads and the types of people they are targeting. These changes, it argues, could stop European Union elections from falling victim to underhanded political tactics, and allow voters to understand who is peppering them with political messaging.

But in its upcoming proposals, the EU executive stopped short of outlawing all microtargeting despite a public consultation showing strong appetite for more stringent restrictions on how political groups find would-be voters.

While the proposals could still change, the internal impact assessment study obtained by POLITICO had two main recommendations for policing political ads: The first would allow national governments to continue regulating these online messages, while pushing for greater coordination across the 27-country bloc. The second proposes an EU-wide system of transparency requirements, for both social media companies and European political parties, as well as more coordinated enforcement if groups break the law.

In the draft document, the Commission backed the second option, which "would best meet the general objectives of the intervention and would mutually establish a coherent and proportionate framework for political ads in the EU," it concluded.

Demands for the EU to overhaul the policing of political ads stem back to the 2019 Parliament elections, when major platforms imposed new transparency requirements on who could buy political ads online. But those systems turned out to be clunky, difficult to enforce and were limited to how individual EU countries enforced their own rules around partisan paid-for messaging.

EU-wide political groups and European advocacy groups were also critical, saying the rules made it hard for them to conduct campaigns.

Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter have implemented their own voluntary initiatives to limit interference and disinformation during elections.Twitter has banned political ads altogether, while Facebook and Google have imposed limits and a brief moratorium ahead of the U.S. election in November but still allow partisan groups to target users with ads.

Still, these initiatives did little to stem the flow of money into online political ads. Millions of euros have been spent on them in the EU since April 2019, some by the Commission itself, according to data from Facebook and Google. In comparison, billions of euros have been spent in the United States over the same period.

In response, some European lawmakers have called for an outright ban on targeted advertising. They point to concerns about the use of personal data and risks to democracy from splicing up the electorate into bite-sized groups of voters.

In the draft text, Commission officials floated the possibility of a ban on political targeted ads. In a public consultation as part of the internal assessment, EU officials also noted that 58 percent of respondents backed additional limits on targeted political ads, including a ban or opt-in by users.

But the Commission eventually decided to reject such a moratorium, arguing that smaller political groups would be penalized if they weren't allowed to target groups of voters. The EU executive branch argued in the document that greater transparency requirements, as part of new rules targeting political ads, would "allow for greater public scrutiny of differentiated political campaign messaging and will empower citizens to hold political actors more accountable for their different messages and promises.

"Ageneral ban on the use of targetingwas discarded as disproportionate," the Commission concluded.

The political advertising proposals will complement the European Union's content moderation rules, known as the Digital Services Act. That separate bill will impose fines of up to 6 percent of firms' yearly revenue if they do not comply with provisions that include regular audits of how firms are handling potential harmful content, and demand greater transparency around how algorithms promote material in people's news feeds.

As part of the proposed overhaul, the Commission wants platforms to disclose how much is spent on particular campaigns, who is the buyer and whether the ad was amplified by an algorithm. Buyers will also have to open up about the criteria used for targeting users such as their ages, gender, interests, and the time period when the ad was shown.Such requirements go well beyond what companies already provide voluntarily.

The firms already give some of that information via publicly-available databases. But Brussels believes they should give all voters and third parties granular information on how people are targeted and what data has been used to pinpoint them. These rules, when passed after consultation with the European Parliament and member countries, would be mandatory and represent a steep change in current voluntary rules associated with online political ads.

Experts argue that voluntary transparency requirements often fail to clarify who is behind a campaign.

New York University researchers found that more than half of Facebook pages that had displayed political ads in the United States during a 13-month period concealed the identities of their buyers. POLITICO also discovered evidence of political groups not being open about their partisan ties when they have targeted voters via social media.

The Commission also will recommend tech companies adopt a common standard for classifying information about online ads. Currently, the information comes in different formats, making it impossible to compare ad information between different platforms. Tech companies would also need to comply with a universal definition of what constitutes a political ad.

If the Commission gets its way, social media firms would be required to limit the microtargeting of voters if political organizations fail to notify the companies that an ad is political in nature. Those limits to undisclosed ads, which would have to be discovered by the tech giants or outside groups, could apply "beyond electoral periods," according to the document.

The Commission's proposals aren't solely limited to Big Tech, but will also apply to Europe's political parties, who will be required to disclose information about their spending on political ads and how they are targeting people via the social media platforms. The EU executive will recommend that EU countries adopt similar standards for national parties and enforce the same transparency and enforcement standards around political ads across the bloc.

"Self-regulation is not a viable option for large platforms," the Commission concluded in the draft text. "Private actors act as de facto enablers and or quasi-regulators of political ads."

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Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads - POLITICO.eu