Facebook Didn't Uphold Political Ads Policy, Rights Group Says
This has partly spurred a group of European politicians and activists to call for a Europe-wide inquiry into Facebook.
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. bought newspaper ads, shipped top executives to Europe, and briefed officials to show it was doing everything it could to prevent manipulation in May’s European elections.
But a Dutch digital rights organization has said it could easily buy and target political posts to voters in other countries, in spite of the social media giant’s stated policies geared at preventing foreign interference in the elections.
“Facebook enabled us to influence German voters using a Dutch Facebook account and Dutch bank account. Election manipulation through Facebook? Piece of cake,” the Dutch organization Bits of Freedom said in a video on its website, showing its tests of the ads policies.
The organization’s findings have partly spurred a group of European politicians and civil society activists to call for a Europe-wide inquiry into tech platforms’ impact on elections.
“This is one indication that promises made did not lead to sufficient improvements,” the group said in a June 5 letter addressed to the leaders of the European Union’s three lawmaking institutions: the European Commission, Parliament and Council.
In an emailed statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said: "deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors."
The social media giant has been scrambling over recent years to contain blowback from findings that Russians and others used the platform to meddle in elections in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Facebook has also recently started calling for coordinated regulation around election integrity and other issues, saying it shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech and what constitutes political advertising on its own.
At the end of March, Facebook expanded on measures it had put in place in several countries and said it would begin vetting the identities of political advertisers in Europe and displaying who paid for specific ads. It also said it would require any advertiser wanting to run ads in a particular country relating to the European elections to prove residence in the same country.
Roughly two weeks before the European parliamentary elections at the end of May, Bits of Freedom uploaded a German political meme related to the German far-right political party AfD and the center-right Christian Democrats.
Using a Dutch Facebook account and Dutch bank account, Bits of Freedom said it could target the post to German residents, 18 years and older, in the north-western city of Bielefeld. Facebook additionally suggested it target people with interests in “nationalism” and the “military,” according to an emailed statement from the Dutch digital rights group. Within days, the meme had sparked 62 reactions and 16 comments from German Facebook users and more than 2,000 people had engaged with it.
In the elections that concluded on May 26, pro-EU powers kept control of the European Parliament, following a surge in support for liberal and green parties in Germany, France and the U.K. Populists won a majority of the national vote in France, Italy and the U.K., but failed to make the broader gains that many polls had projected.
Nad’a Kovalcikova, program manager of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, said her team had seen some narratives depicting migration as a threat and portraying the EU in a negative light in some eastern European countries, but the posts had also appeared before election campaigning had begun.
“It’s a bit too early to assess it properly,” Kovalcikova said of possible manipulation of voters on social media platforms.
Still, the group of liberal, center-left and center-right politicians, and other individuals -- including former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves -- said in the letter that tech platforms’ self-regulatory efforts were insufficient and that “oversight and accountability need to improve.”
In the letter, the group proposed to form a committee of parliamentarians both from national parliaments and from the European Parliament, in order to be able to take testimony from witnesses. The goal would be to gather detailed information and evidence to “help inform future steps and possible regulations.”
In reaction, Facebook said “we agree that industry self-regulation is not a sufficient response to the challenges presented by online political advertising," adding there is "an urgent need" for legislation to be updated. That would provide clarity for both political advertisers and platforms to ensure elections are conducted properly, it said.
The call for the inquiry comes as Europe is still deciding who will get the bloc’s top jobs for the next legislative term. Separately, the U.S. House on Monday said it plans a bipartisan investigation into whether digital platform companies are using their market power to harm competition.
To contact the reporter on this story: Natalia Drozdiak in Brussels at ndrozdiak1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Nate Lanxon
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