Starting with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and its link to Brexit and the 2016 US elections, the nexus among online political advertising, micro-targeting, and data-driven electoral campaigning has revealed its disruptive potential for democracies. While facilitating innovative modes of direct engagement between politics and citizens, online political advertising also allows parties and other political actors to enact strategies that can effectively target highly specific audience segments, with a potential for domestic players with populist agendas or foreign actors to exploit these technologies in order to disrupt public debate and manipulate key electoral processes. However, few countries in Europe introduced a regulation in this respect, to the extent that the digital environment has often been likened to a Wild West. This study has a two-fold aim. First, it presents an up-to-date comparative analysis of the regulation of political advertising in the European Union as well as in individual European countries showing similarities and differences across countries and levels. Second, it provides a descriptive analysis of the way in which domestic political actors used online political advertisements during the 2024 European election campaign exploring which political families use these strategies more frequently and how much they economically invested in advertising tools.
Policy implications
- While increasing the array of resources political actors may use for direct engagement with their supporters, activists, and the general public, digital technologies also proved to have adverse effects, with voter manipulation and election interference becoming severe threats to democratic processes. National and supranational policy makers should bear this in mind, recognize the failure of self-regulation in this area, and establish a carefully crafted regulation of political advertising, both offline and online.
- As far as possible, policy-makers should avoid fragmented and dispersed legislation among several acts. The adoption of a single act—including a comprehensive regulation of offline and online political advertising—may be considered an important way to improve clarity and transparency to advertising agencies, political actors as well as the citizens more broadly.
- Providing specific guidelines to both advertising agencies and political actors on how to comply with existing regulations may help to ensure rule implementation and effectiveness. This can be done by close cooperation between policy makers, academics and practitioners.
- Legislators should strive for internal coherence between offline and online political advertising rules.
Photo by Son Tung Tran