Together with 18 organisations from all over Europe, we have signed a joint statement urging Meta and Google to reverse its decision to stop serving political ads in the EU. The appeal expresses concern that banning ads will disproportionately silence moderate political actors and civil society groups who rely on reasoned discourse, while the engagement-driven algorithms will continue amplifying emotionally charged content.
The combined withdrawal of the two largest platforms from political advertisement set a dangerous precedent of Big Tech exiting rather than adapting to a new regulation. While the current regulatory framework has flaws that require improvement, we believe that platforms shouldn’t abandon their civic responsibilities to improve the rules together with public institutions. We hope both companies will engage in a constructive dialogue on better measures to ensure transparency of the democratic processes.
Read the open letters here: Google, Meta.