The EU Parliament’s report on the #transparency & #targeting of #politicaladvertising was adopted today with a clear majority (433 +, 61 -, 110 abst.).
We made huge steps towards more transparent political campaigns & stronger democracies.
But what's in the report?
Thread 🧵

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147340538277891

We adopted strong transparency rules for all political ads and an EU-wide database for online political ads. This is essential for time-sensitive research and journalism around election campaigns, but also to detect manipulation, disinformation and foreign influence.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147344766124037

The rules don’t apply to private tweets and posts with political content, as the rules only apply to "services". Posts on hosting services, like social media, that are made without consideration for the dissemination of a message are not defined as "advertising services".

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147347102334976

A key success is the stricter regulation for the targeting of political advertising messages:
The use of sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinion, religious conviction, sexual orientation or state of health is to be prohibited.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147349329514497

In future, advertising services will only be allowed to use personal data provided by individuals with their explicit consent for the purpose of targeted political advertising. Behavioural & inferred data may not be used.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147351552520192

However, the restricted scope to “services” only comes with a negative side-effect: the rules will not apply to micro-targeted advertising that is made "in-house", e.g. based on a political party's own database, by letter, email or text messages.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147353758724101

Very good is the ban for advertising services to use algorithms to optimise the delivery of an ad (ad delivery techniques) based on personal data - this prevents platforms from meddling with the final recipients in an opaque way.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147356224950272

In the 60 days before an election, political messages can only be targeted based on language and constituency - we thereby avoid fragmenting the public debate & that contradictory messages can be shown to different audiences.
Democracy needs a common public sphere.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147359085465605

Unfortunately though, the centre-right majority (following heavy lobbying pressure from big tech companies) removed the term "amplification" from the report - so we have no rules in the report to tackle intransparent, polarising recommendation algorithms.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/AlexandraGeese/status/1621147361325228032