EU to protect elections against foreign saboteurs and Big Tech
But lobbyists continue to fight back
European lawmakers have agreed a range of measures designed to protect elections and prevent a fragmentation of policies across the EU.
European lawmakers have agreed plans to ban political advertisements targeting specific ethnic and religious communities, and to block ads funded by foreign lobbyists in the run up to an election, in an effort to protect EU elections from foreign interference.
The latest in an armoury of powers the EU has been amassing to govern big tech firms, the EU's long-awaited rules on digital political ads was followed this week by an announcement from Facebook owner Meta that it was voluntarily going one step further, imposing controls over political adverts using AI-generated images, video and audio on its platform.
The European Parliament finalised years of negotiations with the tech and advertising industries over the modernisation of old rules governing political ads, which became outdated when advertisers moved to online platforms where datasets and algorithms gave them more power to reach their target audiences.
The rules will prevent political campaigners distributing adverts to people identified by characteristics such as sexuality, religion and race: topics of ongoing, contentious political debate. Personal data describing such characteristics are given special protection in European data protection law.
The rules will also forbid non-EU entities from sponsoring political ads three months before an election or referendum, even if they have a legitimate interest in the outcome of elections, the European Parliament said in a statement.
Blazing a trail
The EU has been imposing strict rules on global - and particularly US - tech firms under its Digital Agenda, the EU legislative programme for creating a digital single market that operates as effectively as the market for physical goods and services, of which the political ad rules are a part. It has also sought to export EU values and rules to other parts of the world (example: the GDPR), and has influenced statutes in countries as far flung as Brazil, the US and China.
The EU's long track record of imposing heavy fines against dominant US tech firms under competition rules is continually contested in the courts. The EU revised those rules to give them more power over US big tech firms this year, and to bolster EU industry, with the Digital Markets Act.
This week meanwhile, the European Court of Justice said in a legal opinion that Apple should pay €13bn in tax breaks it got for putting its headquarters in Ireland. The opinion, from the EU Advocate General, has the power to shape EU law.
Lobbying remains a battleground
Campaigners against corporate lobbying criticised big tech firms last year for increasing their political lobbying budgets as the EU prepared to start enacting laws against them under its digital agenda. The biggest six US tech firms increased their EU lobbying budgets by €2 million between 2020 and 2021, to a combined €27 million.
The same campaigners declared yesterday that the top 10 big tech firms spent €40 million on political campaigning in Europe last year. The group said that, in all, 651 large tech firms spent €113 million on lobbying.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, representing big tech firms, said this week that its lobbying had helped prevent the political ad controls being applied to non-paid campaigns, such as emails political groups send to their own members; views expressed by candidates in an election; and even political views freely expressed by anyone. It also claimed to have stopped the rules being imposed in a hurry before next year's EU parliamentary elections, disrupting the political process they sought to protect.
But the rules still "risk undermining the ability to have meaningful electoral debates online", the trade association said in a statement. It did not clarify how it believed this would happen. The rules, it said, were written in vague language that left their implementation open to interpretation, and risked causing the very political fragmentation they had sought to prevent.
A unified legal bloc
The EU created its digital political ad rules in part because the growing irrelevance of existing rules had caused EU member states to start implementing their own legislation to govern online ads. The EU sought to usurp them and prevent a fragmentation of EU politics.
The EU rules will also give people a right to know who funded a political advertisement and how much money they paid when they are finally introduced - in a couple of years' time, if they are given the final approval they need from the European Parliament and member states in the EU Council.
They will prevent political advertisers buying voter lists from standard marketing databases other advertisers use, as well. Political advertisers would only be permitted to target ads using data provided explicitly for the purpose of being shown political adverts.
Meta said its rules on AI-generated ads would apply to any photo-realistic media that depicted real people saying and doing things they hadn't; that manufacture a fake person or event; or replicate a real event. Such ads would be permitted, but only with clear labelling.