Last year the European Union introduced legislation to greatly improve the transparency around political advertising, specifically on social media and websites. The law mandates a few very basic requirements that tend to already apply to many other forms of political advertising, like clearly labeling who paid for the ad and how much was spent, which election or referendum they’re about, and which targeting techniques were used.
In addition, data used for targeting may only be collected from the person being targeted, and the person targeted has to give explicit permission specifically for political advertising. Furthermore, a whole slew of data types are not allowed to be used, such as data that may reveal ethnic or racial origin or political opinions. Lastly, an obvious one: starting three months before an election of referendum, third country sponsors are banned from advertising.
It seems these rather basic, elementary requirements are too much for Facebook, as the company today announced it’s going to stop offering political advertising in the European Union altogether in October of this year. The company cries on its blog:
Despite extensive engagement with policymakers to share these concerns, we have been left with an impossible choice: alter our services to offer an advertising product which doesn’t work for advertisers or users, without guarantee that our solution would be viewed as compliant, or stop allowing political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU. We’re not the only company to have been forced into this position. Once again, we’re seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market, reducing choice and competition.
↫ Sad Facebook
As the link in Facebook’s above lament points out, Google has also decided to stop offering political advertising in the European Union, for the exact same reasons. Facebook and Google are clearly trying to frame this as “bad”, but the only people the removal of hyper-targeted political advertising is bad for are threat actors trying to unduly and illegally influence elections, and of course, for the bottom line of Facebook and Google. Neither of these are of any relevance to the proper execution of fair and free elections, and people all across the European Union will be better off without these two advertising giants providing an easy avenue for shady organisations and foreign entities to unduly influence our elections.
Basically, cry me a river Zuck. Nobody likes you.
Good riddance!
Great, does this mean there won’t be any more Zionist disinformation campaigns by the IDF on YT?
“Sad Facebook” Haha.
Facebook’s own PR piece fails to garner sympathy, go cry us a river. It’s obvious that corporations want a piece of the political advertising revenue, but relief from this political spam sounds good to me. If anything I think that most of us outside the EU wish we could get political ads taken down as well.
Companies always want guarantees they can pass audits BEFORE the audit, or before the inspection. This happens all the time at local planning boards, and often they’ll grant them. Much of the time the answer is “no” – and company leaders HATE that word. Tough!! Deal with it. It’s the only right answer.
I think its reasonable in an audit to know the criteria to pass. For example, if you carry out an ISO27k assessment you know the criteria Beofre the audit. Its then up to you to provide the relevant evidence. The EU haven’t provided that for the advertisers. So they might develop a whole platform that still isnt compliant (even without trying to bend any rules).
Now, saying that, Im not sheding a tear that FB and Google won’t be making money off political advertising, but without official advertising, I Am concerned what will fill the void.
Good riddance technofascist scum.
Just say no to propaganda.