6 Dec 2019

Democracy watchdog eyes online advertising in UK election

From Nine To Noon, 9:24 am on 6 December 2019

In the run up to the UK general election on December 12, politicians are spending up on social media platforms. But in the light of last year's Cambridge Analytica scandal, there’s an increased wariness about political advertising online and its influence on democracy. 

Watchdog organisation Who Targets Me has spent years tracking how political groups and parties sell their messages to voters and why.

The billions of ads political groups buy on social media platforms play a vital role in every modern election campaign yet there’s little research in the area because social media companies have only recently started sharing even a portion of data on the subject. 

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (L) and Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (R) as they debate on the set of "Johnson v Corbyn: The ITV Debate" in Salford, north-west England. - Britain will go to the polls on December 12, 2019 to vote in a pre-Christmas general election.

Photo: AFP

Sam Jeffers is the co-founder of Who Targets Me and previously worked on the UK's Labour Party campaign in 2015. He tells Lynn Freeman there’s a lack of scrutiny and oversight of social media ads.

“As things like the Brexit referendum result came about, as stories like Cambridge Analytica and its involvement in the US election in 2016 began to emerge, people rightly began to ask what’s actually going on here? Can we have a look under the lid of what’s happening and start to try and explain it.

“I think that pressure, in the end, has resulted in some better transparency tools and some ways of seeing what’s going on, but there’s still quite a long way to go.”

With the forthcoming UK election, he says it’s more or less campaigning as usual but there are some advertisements online that wouldn’t fly in more traditional media. 

“The ads themselves that stretch the point a bit further than an interviewer might let you get away with, we think that’s quite an interesting phenomenon, particularly in this election where the Conservative Party is making a number of claims which have been, if not debunked, quite contested in the media. But, on social media they’re quite happy to keep pushing these claims around.

“They also go on the attack a lot more than they would in a traditional media format. They’re negative about the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn - they spend a lot of time attacking him. The counter-side to that is the Labour Party has a very active anti-Tory voice as well. It’s a lot rougher and readier than you see in the traditional media environment."

Jeffers says that since the scandals of the last few years have been revealed, traditional media outlets are much more savvy with keeping an eye on social media advertisements and most papers and online outlets have a digital media team scrutinising the parties’ ads. 

“I think that’s a healthy new development. What we also see is a lot of people saying they don’t use Facebook anymore, they don’t trust it. That’s something we didn’t see so much of in 2017 and is now very common.”

He says that in the first two weeks of the campaign, the Conservative Party was relatively quiet. One of the theories is they were testing and refining their messages. In the last week, however, they launched more than 3000 ads which are tailored to specific seats and regions. They are particularly targeting the North of England and the Midlands with economic messages. 

“One of the thoughts is that people have very short recall for advertising that’s put in front of them, so you want to do it as late and as big as possible. But if you don’t know what you’re doing in advance of that, you don’t know where you’re spending your money. So, what they’ve been doing is spending weeks getting a few very well crafted and tailored messages and ads together, and they’re now spending millions and millions of pounds and the ads will suddenly emerge and everyone will be bombarded with this stuff.”

There are also non-party - pro-remain, pro-Brexit - groups spending significant amounts of money on Facebook ads. There’s also been an emergence of smaller single-issue groups, particularly on the right, he says.

“That didn’t really exist around 2015 or 2017, so there’s a beginning of something like what you see in America - right-wing political action committees spending money to further their agenda as well. That’s a new development.”

One of the biggest problems with modern elections is that electoral law has not kept pace with the changing nature of the media landscape, in particular, social media. 

“When it comes to moving something through Parliament [on electoral law], there’s no momentum at all. The electoral commission and Information Commission Office both have quite detailed proposals for what they’d like to see happen but there’s really no political will. It didn’t find its way into the Conservative party manifesto, it’s not in their programme for government should they be elected. It may well be that the 2019 election has no new laws, but the 2024 election has no new laws either.”

The Conservative Party has been accused of “shitposting” recently, but Jeffers says what they’re doing is more akin to boomer memes. He explains boomer memes are bad memes an older relative might share on Facebook. He says it was a calculated move to get the media talking about them.

“They didn’t actually get many people sharing them, but that seems to be more their approach this time - to try and muddy the waters, to try and divert people from talking about policy and issues by doing things at various moments that distract and deny people the opportunity to really evaluate what they’re up to.”

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