Blue Sky Democracy, Part 11: Every political ad in the palm of your hand

For our fourth little idea, we’re going to do something that is most people’s worst nightmare: making it easier to see political ads.

Political ads are everywhere: social media, TV, radio, podcasts, streaming services, billboards, on your neighbour’s fence, on your plumber’s ute, on screens in bathrooms and elevators, and straight into your mailbox or under your door.

They’re unavoidable.

Most of the time it’s pretty easy to see who made the ad, but sometimes the little authorisation at the bottom gives you no more than a surname and a city, leaving you none the wiser.

There’s even been cases of party campaigners, with debatable levels of direction from the party itself, setting up vaguely-named astroturfing fronts to distribute authorised attack material without linking back to their campaign.

While these pseudo-anonymous ads are bad enough, even when you can tell exactly who wrote them, they can be targeted in such a way that you can tell one person in one hour you love the colour blue, while you’ve told their neighbour the opposite.

Microtargeting got a lot of attention for how it plays out on social media, but being able to target bubbles of demographics with not just different but entirely contradictory messages has been common practice for years.

A possible solution to both these problems lies with Facebook.

In 2019, following backlash from the 2016 US Presidential election and 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook deployed a suite of “transparency” measures to help their users identify political advertising on their platform. While most of these measures were not deployed in Australia in 2019 (Facebook tends to only deploy these functions in places where they are legally required to), the Facebook Ad Library got additional functionality around political advertising disclosure.

The Library now provides a (mostly) comprehensive list of recent ads on their platforms, with results displaying the full ad, which brand it was made under, who the “disclaimer” (ie the organisation who paid for the ad) is, how much was spent and what the reach was including demographic and location breakdown. Authorisations on political ads are also mandatory in Australia from 2020.

Leaving such a vital function up to a private company to self-regulate is a problem — especially with Facebook’s own technology prone to failure.

But the idea of a centralised real-time database of political advertising is appealing. More appealing to me than fluffy, unenforceable “truth in political advertising” laws that might infringe on people’s right to free speech (and frankly their right to lie).

A regulatory agency could build a database for any authorised political communications. APIs could integrate with online advertising for linking and live-updating, while video, audio and print advertising could be provided with unique identification codes so recipients can search the database. The database wouldn’t need to have too many fields to be useful: who authorised it, on behalf of what organisation, what if any third party paid for it, are they a director of a company, are they a member of a political party, where and when is this being distributed.

In the end, the actual level of sophistication in the database is beside the point.

The real benefit is the administrative burden of providing every ad and the necessary metadata to the database would have a knock on effect of reducing the overall amount of advertising material, as campaigners weigh up the time investment and potential exposure risk. .

None of this solves the more intractable problem of anonymous individuals distributing intentional lies, whether that’s with a viral tweet or with a hand-delivered flyer. Stopping that is way harder and runs up against people’s right to privacy and anonymity. There’s a longer discussion to be had about at what point — at what scale of following — does someone’s private communications become tantamount to publication.

In our final part, we’re going to look at public election funding and how we can make it fairer.