Brussels – The EU aims at greater transparency on political advertisements, in an attempt to safeguard the quality of public debate and the integrity of electoral processes. But the cure may turn out to be worse than the disease, at least according to the criticism from those directly concerned, namely online platforms and political actors. According to them, this does not solve the problem, but creates another one: the drying up of public debate itself.
The 2024/900 regulation, which was adopted in March last year and entered into force today (10 October), should serve to strengthen public confidence in election campaigns, helping to provide a bulwark against the spread of disinformation. Especially that orchestrated by foreign actors in the context of the so-called FIMI operations (acronym for “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference”), which are particularly insidious in the post-industrial societies of the Old Continent, especially when coinciding with elections.
The new rules do not regulate the content of advertisements, nor do they ban the advertisements themselves. Rather, they aim to harmonise the manner in which they are disseminated, requiring, for example, advertisers to clearly indicate who pays for a given advertisement (and how much), as well as whether that advertisement is disseminated using specific targeting techniques and is related to a specific election or legislative process.
The day before yesterday, the EU executive published guidelines for political actors and service providers of political advertising, aimed at facilitating the implementation of the regulation. These guidelines will be the subject of a debate in the Internal Market Committee (IMCO) of the EU Parliament on 16 October.
The chamber’s chief rapporteur, the liberal Sandro Gozi, describes the regulation as “the European response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal”, which in 2018 had uncovered serious privacy violations by the British political consultancy firm—which had played a key role in both Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign, both in 2016—in which Facebook had also been implicated, guilty of selling the sensitive data of millions of users without their consent. “After the massive manipulation that undermined our democracies, the EU is now putting in place a robust system to prevent similar abuses from happening again,” explains the Renew MEP.
However, the new rules do not please everyone. Starting with digital giants such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft, who, rather than comply, are willing to abandon the business of political advertisements within the twelve-star jurisdiction. Gozi’s response to the tech giants is stark: “In Europe, democratic rules are not optional,” he argues, and “to suggest that it is possible to get around the law and evade the responsibilities borne by any actor operating in our market is simply unacceptable.”
Moreover, not even political actors agree with the regulatory framework of Regulation 2024/900. The criticism, which cuts across party lines, focuses particularly on the risk of a content chasm opening up and emptying the debate, potentially harming users with a vertical collapse in the production of political messages.
It would be a risk especially for smaller and newer political actors and independent candidates, who might lose accessible channels to reach a very large pool of voters, with the consequent restriction of democratic pluralism; also, in perspective, for a plethora of bodies, organisations, and associations that are not purely political but nevertheless engaged in the debate of public issues of potentially political significance. The Berlaymont has stated that it is in constant contact with stakeholders (especially big business) and the governments of the Twenty-Seven.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
