The research focused on three case studies in Italy, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Throughout these three case studies, researchers examined the extent to which Facebook, Google and Twitter fulfilled their commitments outlined in the Code of Practice on Online Disinformation regarding enhanced transparency of digital political advertising, in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections. The researchers interviewed key stakeholders from political parties, civil society, national regulators and digital platforms to assess the extent of meaningful transparency, and the interplay between the EU Code of Practice and national legislation. Following this, the researchers submitted a series of recommendations to the European Commission, the EU Member States, and held multiple multi-stakeholder policy dialogues in Brussels and Member State capitals Our research identified the following issues with regards to increasing the transparency of political ads: 1. Defining political ads: While establishing a unanimous definition of what classifies as a political ad is difficult, the lack of a clear definition within the Code of Practice was detrimental to its application. Without a clear definition, tech companies were forced to come up with their own definitions of political ads, which resulted in inconsistencies through platforms on what was labelled as a political ad and was subject to scrutiny, and what bypassed the verification systems set in place by the tech platforms to verify content and transparency. Particularly affected were issue ads (e.g. campaigns on environmental issues, migration, encouraging voter turnout) which were either completely overlooked or intensely scrutinized.
2. Ads labelling and verification of advertisers: The ad labelling system provides insufficient information on the reasons for targeting users and the data used to make these decisions. Meanwhile, the verification procedure for political advertisers is overly burdensome and lengthy, and the platforms could not deliver in verifying all advertisers who had embarked on the verification process in time for the European Parliament elections. Particularly, the verification system failed to account for third-parties, proxy advertisers and social media influencers, thereby failing to provide transparency on such political advertising practices and the advertisers themselves. Through this, it failed to identify and avoid inauthentic behaviour through both verified accounts and fake accounts.
3. Ad Libraries & Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): Ad libraries were created by the three platforms as the main transparency tool that was newly rolled out for the EU Member States ahead of the European Parliament elections in 2019. These ad libraries were supposed to provide a user-friendly overview of all political and issue ads. However, the different ad libraries showed a number of shared as well as platform-specific shortcomings. A major shared shortcoming is the lack of meaningful, complete and accurate data provided in the libraries, including targeting criteria, data on the intended and reached audiences, exact spend, ad performance, and targeting mechanisms. These libraries were also found to be missing content depending on the time and location of the user, and as there is no comprehensive repository of all paid content, which makes it impossible to verify the accuracy, completeness and consistency of political ads libraries. Tech companies were found to be reticent to allocate enough resources to ad labelling. The platforms failed to put in place adequate control mechanisms, with insufficient manpower allocated to issues such as identifying political (or issue) ads that were not labelled as such and political advertisers who had not been verified. 4. Policy Context at National Level: Our research revealed that National Regulators tend to have little to no guidelines for online political advertising. Because of this, the Code of Practice taken for the European Parliament elections in 2019 was significant in the sense that it raised awareness on the lack of regulation regarding party finance and political advertising transparency. Researchers also found that national regulatory authorities generally lacked the sanctioning mechanisms and mandates to hold political parties and platforms accountable to the transparency measures outlined in the Code of Practice. 5. Policy changes by the platforms since the European Parliament elections: Following the EU Parliament election, tech companies, under public pressure, took some initiatives to improve transparency. Facebook adapted some transparency tools, expanded the ad library to new countries, and is creating an oversight board. Meanwhile, Google limited targeting of political ads and Twitter decided to apply a ban on all political ads.
