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Britain’s campaign laws leave our elections open to fake news and manipulation

December’s election was the third Westminster election in four years. Each one of those has highlighted a growing crisis facing the UK’s electoral politics. In an article published by The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Brittany...

Posted 29 Jan 2020

Parties and third-party campaigners spent around £5.9 million on Facebook

Could social media warp the next General Election?

Facebook recently triggered a major public debate by changing its rules on posts by political campaigners. Previously these had been open to ‘fact-checking’ by trusted organisations. However, the new decision means the site will not...

Posted 29 Oct 2019

Digital political campaigning remains as unregulated as ever – but calls for reform are increasing

Over the weekend, Buzzfeed reported that Britain’s Future, an obscure pro-Brexit group, spent almost £350,000 on 2,600 Facebook adverts over the course of five months, micro-targeting tens of thousands of voters to get them to...

Posted 12 Mar 2019

Reining in the political ‘Wild West’: Why we need campaign rules for the 21st century

Political party campaigning has shifted dramatically online in recent years. To give just one example: political parties spent around £1.3 million on Facebook adverts during the 2015 general election. This more than doubled two years...

Posted 04 Feb 2019

We can’t leave political transparency to the whim of big tech firms: it’s time for a campaign overhaul

When an election is just around the corner, there are several tell-tale signs: politicians incessantly visiting factories, thousands of signs strapped to lampposts, and tensions mounting at the dinner table. And there are the flyers....

Posted 23 Oct 2018

Online campaigning is a wild west – it’s time we knew what parties were up to

If 2015 was the digital election, this one is more specifically the Facebook election. With the big money rolling into the social media giant from parties – Labour and the Conservatives are planning to spend a million pounds...

Posted 30 May 2017