Facebook, Google cease political advertising in the EU because of new EU transparency and accountability law

Last year the European Union introduced legislation to greatly improve the transparency around political advertising, specifically on social media and websites. The law mandates a few very basic requirements that tend to already apply to many other forms of political advertising, like clearly labeling who paid for the ad and how much was spent, which election or referendum they’re about, and which targeting techniques were used.

In addition, data used for targeting may only be collected from the person being targeted, and the person targeted has to give explicit permission specifically for political advertising. Furthermore, a whole slew of data types are not allowed to be used, such as data that may reveal ethnic or racial origin or political opinions. Lastly, an obvious one: starting three months before an election of referendum, third country sponsors are banned from advertising.

It seems these rather basic, elementary requirements are too much for Facebook, as the company today announced it’s going to stop offering political advertising in the European Union altogether in October of this year. The company cries on its blog:

Despite extensive engagement with policymakers to share these concerns, we have been left with an impossible choice: alter our services to offer an advertising product which doesn’t work for advertisers or users, without guarantee that our solution would be viewed as compliant, or stop allowing political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU. We’re not the only company to have been forced into this position. Once again, we’re seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market, reducing choice and competition.
↫ Sad Facebook

As the link in Facebook’s above lament points out, Google has also decided to stop offering political advertising in the European Union, for the exact same reasons. Facebook and Google are clearly trying to frame this as “bad”, but the only people the removal of hyper-targeted political advertising is bad for are threat actors trying to unduly and illegally influence elections, and of course, for the bottom line of Facebook and Google. Neither of these are of any relevance to the proper execution of fair and free elections, and people all across the European Union will be better off without these two advertising giants providing an easy avenue for shady organisations and foreign entities to unduly influence our elections.

Basically, cry me a river Zuck. Nobody likes you.