Posted on 11/24/2020 5:00:43 PM PST by nickcarraway
Google is bringing its political ad reporting to Australia — and for the first time, we will see how much money parties and other groups spend to target us with ads on its search engine, YouTube, and elsewhere in its network.
This change will bring more transparency to how parties run their online campaigns, including how much is spent on ads targeting certain groups of voters.
A Google spokesman has confirmed the system, which the US has had since 2018, will be running in Australia "early next year".
Political communication experts have welcomed the news, saying they expect the system will be an important resource for journalists, academics and other interested parties.
Andrea Carson, an expert on political communication at La Trobe University, said Google's transparency website was "long overdue", adding that she could not wait to learn how much parties were spending online.
"Digital spending is going up exponentially with every election," she said.
"I'm glad Google is finally doing this, though it would have been good to have had it for 2019."
Despite the enthusiasm, there are few international examples of the system proving its effectiveness.
Google the biggest player in online ads In Australia, political parties are not required to disclose the details of their ad spending.
For radio, television and print political ads, market research companies like Nielsen keep accurate figures.
But third parties are unable to track online ads, as they only appear for targeted users. This means the cost of these ads is highly variable, and the total ad spend is determined by the number of clicks or views.
This approach has allowed political groups, including parties, to effectively conceal the tens of millions of dollars they spend on online ads. But it's estimated these ads account for at least half of party ad budgets.
The 2016 US election showed how powerful targeted social media advertising could be, and this put pressure on tech companies to be more transparent about who was paying to put political ads in front of voters.
In 2019, Facebook launched a searchable global ad database, while Twitter simply banned all political ads.
But in Australia, that still left one big player unaccounted for: It's estimated Google takes about half of all money spent on digital advertising.
How will reporting work?
The Google political advertising transparency report is an updated, searchable database that shows:
Google, which declined an interview request, has been slowly rolling this out worldwide since 2018. New Zealand got it in May, and has since reported over 2,000 political ads in the country.
A screenshot from Google's political ad transparency report A screenshot from Google's transparency report, showing the top spenders on political ads in New Zealand since May 2020.(Supplied) The reporting system shows that, for instance, a NZ charitable trust recently spent up to $75,000 to put an anti-euthanasia ad in front of more than one million people.
Australia's version will launch early next year, and preparations are already underway to verify advertisers, who will need to verify their identity with the company in order to run ads that feature "a political party, current elected officeholder, or candidate for the [Australian] House of Representatives or Senate".
Verifying identity includes providing an Australian street address, photographic ID and proof of citizenship or permanent residency, with the policy to be enforced from December 2020, the company's website states.
Will it stop misinformation? It's important to note the database doesn't cover all political ads — only those judged to be 'electoral'.
An ad that mentions the debunked conspiracy theory about Black Summer bushfires being spread by arson, for example, but does not feature a party or politician, will not appear in the database.
A recent example from the US election shows how the system works, as well as where it falls down.
A few weeks out from the recent US election, the Trump campaign spent up to US$50,000 promoting a YouTube video falsely claiming that Venezuela's ruling clique was backing Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
The ad ran only in Florida, where the President was trying to gain support among Latino voters by tying Biden to socialist leaders.
The video was solidly debunked, but YouTube didn't take it down. It went on to be viewed up to a million times.
The President won Florida by about 375,000 votes, thanks partly to the Cuban-American vote, according to exit polls.
Without the transparency website, none of these figures would have been public.
Having this data, however, didn't stop misinformation: it only showed how far the misinformation had travelled.
People hold placards on October 10, 2020 in Orlando People hold placards on October 10, 2020 in Orlando, Florida.(Getty Images: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto) It's a similar situation in the UK, which has had the transparency reporting for about a year, said Cristian Vaccari, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University in the UK.
"At the end of the day, we see political parties ... using traditional media to convey completely false information," he said.
"[They] don't need a finally targeted stealth Facebook or Google ad campaign to push those messages out."
In the Australian context, the transparency website wouldn't have stopped false ads about Labor's 'death tax' in 2019, though it might have shown exactly how much was being paid to push these to voters.
Tracking the 'dark money' of politics Rather than policing misinformation by the major parties or established players, the transparency website is most useful in finding instances of "unofficial" or "dark money" groups running political ads, Professor Vaccari said.
"It's mostly about what the unofficial groups are doing," he said.
Such groups could range from industry bodies to foreign countries, or perhaps a network of politically minded billionaires.
In Australia, under legislation enforced by the Australian Electoral Commission, ads on electoral matters must be authorised (i.e. explicitly linked with a group or individual), but in practice the AEC is not resourced to monitor this effectively, and Google has been slow to assist its official enquiries.
So far, the one-year-old transparency website has not facilitated any major revelations about dark money in the UK, Professor Vaccari said.
"We don't know if it's because we haven't looked carefully enough," he said.
Dr Peter Chen, a senior politics lecturer at the University of Sydney, said he expected there would be a "considerable amount of game-playing" by unofficial groups to conceal who was ultimately funding them.
"Australia is interesting because the role of third-party funders and shadow funding has accelerated a lot in recent years," he said.
He pointed to Clive Palmer, who spent $83 million on the 2019 election. Though Mr Palmer did not win a seat, some experts say he was able to thwart Labor in a few key electorates and ultimately help the Coalition win government.
Asked why Google was introducing the transparency reporting now, when it had not been asked to do this by the Government or the Opposition, Dr Chen speculated that it had to do with the current threat of regulation.
Google and Facebook are fighting the Australian Government over whether they should pay to have news on their platforms.
Google may be acting voluntarily to defer external regulation, Dr Chen said, or to fire a 'warning shot' at politicians.
Both sides of politics have long resisted calls for parties to report their political ad spending.
Now Google will simply publish the data for anyone to read.
"It is ironic that these platforms, which some members of the political class are happy to beat up on, are doing things that the political elites won't do," Dr Chen said.
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