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General election 2019: The battle for your newsfeed

Christian Adams
Christian Adams

If you are man and under 35, the Conservatives have an Eighties vibe for you. A party Facebook ad with a slogan in a neon scrawl and a soundtrack like a bad T’Pau B-side has been seen around half a million times. If you are in your 60s, you get cheesy piano electronica and a fizzy picture of the Prime Minister wearing a lopsided blue tie. Welcome to the general election, 2019-style, on a digital device near you.

Political clichés linger: we still talk of activists delivering leaflets, and candidates report the response on the doorstep. But there’s another virtual campaign that’s targeted and under little formal control. The party that wins this fight may end up running Britain.

Actually, there are at least three different elections taking place online, and none of them are properly policed. The first is the one represented by formal paid-for political ads, most of them on Facebook or its subsidiary Instagram.

In a way they are just an advance on the big poster billboards parties once used to spend money on — the sort Margaret Thatcher used to tell us that “Labour isn’t working”.

Twitter says it won’t take political ads. Facebook defends them as free speech, and you can now look them up on its Ad Library. “Political advertising on Facebook is now far more transparent than anywhere else,” argued Nick Clegg in a speech last month — the former deputy PM now works for the firm.

And in a sense he’s right. You can spend hours diving into the amounts parties are spending and what they are showing people. In the last week Labour has spent £58,648 on 79 targeted Facebook ads, and the Conservatives £58,114 on 103 of them. A lot of these ads are harmless. “Learn more about part one of our plan here”, say the Lib Dems earnestly in one. Alternatively, most of us might just decide to watch a cute kitten video instead.

Others have impact: the Conservatives spent the weekend (and £10,000) showing clips of Labour figures contradicting each other on Brexit to middle-aged men in England — which is why it appeared on my timeline.

Attack ads like these, which make opponents look like fools, are a staple of paid-for TV advertising in the US, and now they are here, too: last week the Tories were caught out making it look as if Labour’s Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer was silenced by a question on his policy. In fact, he answered fluently.

The problem with Facebook’s “Nothing to worry about, here’s the raw data” approach is that Britain never took the decision to allow paid-for political advertising like this. Unlike the US or Australia, it’s banned on TV, and posters never had the cut-through of a personalised message on your phone.

The Electoral Commission, which is meant to police elections, wants the Government to give it the power to limit spending on online ads and ensure they are properly reported, rather than having to hope sites such as Facebook volunteer information.

And what if a political ad goes up that isn’t registered by a campaign? Facebook says it uses a mix of machine learning and manual checking to spot them. “We may ask for clarification”, says a Commission spokesman. “It depends on each case.” In theory, it can issue a “stop notice” to get an ad taken down. In reality, no one there can recall that power ever being used.

That’s like taking a stick of celery to stop a Wild West gun fight. Instead, says the former culture minister Ed Vaizey, “Government should regulate in the same way as it does broadcast media. It should look at spending limits. Advertisers should report where the money has gone and who has seen the ads”.

The second way the election is happening digitally is through outside campaigns. If these spend less than £20,000 in England there’s no need for them to report to the Electoral Commission and, of course, there’s no limit on the number that can be set up once they hit the cap. Maybe you are a Lancastrian proud to see your neighbours are paying for ads on behalf of Ribble Valley For Europe (seen 40,000 times for a bill to its backers of about £300).

You might be less thrilled when you realise it isn’t local at all. The sponsor, Mike Galsworthy, is behind everything from Highlands For Europe to Plymouth Against Brexit.

If you want to know who is paying for ads like his as they pop up, you can download a tool to your browser, Who Targets Me, which is trying to monitor the underground digital campaign. It’s doing the job the Commission can’t. It watches your Facebook timeline and works out who is behind the ads you are seeing and why you are getting them.

In the last week the anti-Brexit alliance Best for Britain spent £72,493 encouraging people to register to vote. Some of its ads target the Tories. Should they count in spending limits? And, in passing, was the £1 million plus they spent alongside the People’s Vote campaign wasted money? It proves that big budgets aren’t everything.

Search Facebook’s Ad Library, for instance, and you will see that the pro-Corbyn Momentum group only spent £5,000 on ads in the last year. But it has a big and potent online campaign machine with an engaging Facebook page. None of this counts as part of Labour’s formal campaign or is registered with the Electoral Commission.

Of course, activist sites such as Momentum have a right to speak out. And their agenda is clear. Others are not. “We want clearer reporting categories,” the Commission says. But the rules aren’t about to change before polling day.

That matters even more when it comes to the third way the election is happening online. The real hardcore election material slips in unpaid, pushed by trolls and bots, from sites a million miles from formal ads, with agendas never reported as part of official campaigns. It’s not regulated or illegal. But maybe it should be.

So we are left to find other ways to work out what is going on. One of them is NewsGuard, a browser device that’s been monitoring the trustworthiness of UK sites since April. It doesn’t block anything. Instead, it warns users what not to believe. One that fails its tests is breakingbrexitnews.blog, an anonymously-run pro-Brexit news site which doesn’t disclose its agenda and has more than 105,000 Facebook followers.

Another pro-Brexit page, politicaluk.co.uk, run — the sites says — by a Conservative member, James Cooper, got more than 198,000 Facebook interactions last week. NewsGuard gives it a green rating. But it fails some of its criteria for trustworthiness.

And there are lots of sites like it. Politicalite.com (a red rating from NewsGuard) boasts it is “Britain’s most censored outlet” and is full of anti-Labour rants such as “Far-Left posties plot to hand Corbyn victory by refusing to deliver postal votes”. Its mirror image is vox​politicalonline.com — 33,000 Facebook likes and shares last week — which has just reported that “false accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn have risen again — like zombies”.

Sites like these say they are funded by advertising and aren’t fronts for anyone. But even if that’s right, they are there to be part of the campaign, not just reporting on it. Of course, some newspapers have been like that for years: Neil Kinnock once found his face stuck on a lightbulb on polling day. But at least people knew what they were buying.

When stuff turns up on your social media, it’s there because someone has calculated it will shape the way you think. Scared of Muslims? Furious about Trots? Hate Boris Johnson or love him? There’s a digital campaigner out there gunning for you.

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