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Vera Jourova: Vice President of the EU Commission
Photo: OLIVIER HOSLET / EPA
The EU Commission wants to regulate political advertising on the Internet more strictly and thus make it better recognizable. On Thursday, the Vice President of the EU Commission, Vera Jourova, presented a corresponding legislative proposal. "Elections must not be a competition of opaque and dirty methods," said Jourova. According to the plans, political online advertising, for example on Facebook or Instagram, must be marked as such in the future. In addition, it should be made transparent who paid for an advertisement.
"Voters are increasingly having trouble distinguishing whether the content they see is paid for or organic," said Jourova.
According to a Eurobarometer poll released earlier this month, four in ten Europeans do not know whether certain online content is from political campaigns.
Jourova named the Brexit campaign as an example of the risks of such content.
»Microtargeting« should be made more difficult
According to the proposal, providers of political advertisements are no longer allowed to use sensitive data that is shared online to target their messages to specific groups of people.
This means that information about the political attitudes, sexual orientation, religion or origin of users may only be used to tailor political advertisements to a person if they have expressly consented to such a procedure.
In the industry, such methods are called »microtargeting«.
Data analysis companies create profiles of people by evaluating information about likes, goods orders or other personal information on the Internet.
These profiles are then used to send targeted political messages to the people in question.
Who is shown what and why?
The draft law also stipulates that advertising providers and platforms such as Facebook must disclose to users how and why they tailor advertisements to them, i.e. why they are shown a specific election advertisement and which target groups this advertisement is tailored to.
Organizations that cannot meet these transparency requirements should therefore not be allowed to publish political advertisements.
The rules are to be implemented by the authorities of the EU countries and, among other things, punished with fines, as the proposal shows.
The European Parliament and the EU states are now dealing with the proposed law.
You can still make changes before this is passed - but that may take some time.
mak / dpa
