“The online giants use an advertising-based business model – you pay for using the service with your data, which is then sold to advertisers. Citizens need to be aware of this.” Brkan also thinks it’s a problem that there’s no clear distinction between commercial and political advertising. “There are currently no EU rules that deal specifically with political advertising – any restrictions would have to be based in the GDPR or the recently revised regulation on funding of political parties.”

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation restricts targeting political ads to those who have explicitly consented to it through e.g. activating cookies. While Brkan hails the GDPR as an important first step in the right direction, she has a problem with resting an issue vital to freedom of elections on this one wobbly pillar: “it’s not the most appropriate framework …”

Crucially, there are no restrictions on content apart from the legislation on hate speech, which in itself a grey area. “Even false and deliberately misleading information could potentially be protected by freedom of expression.” For the moment, the legal landscape is a complex one but “the EU has acted with urgency and was quick to react on a policy level and by establishing expert groups to help them understand and deal with the problem.”

Making European citizens aware

Brkan keeps stressing that this is a fundamental threat to democracy, which shouldn’t be the reserve of ivory tower sophists; and so she does her best to engage citizens. During the Maastricht Europe Days, she hosted an event on the threats of fake news and political advertising entitled, consisting of a discussion with academic Danielle Arets and Roy op het Veld, editor-in-chief of the newspaper 'De Limburger'.

Op het Veld made the painful and painfully obvious point that reliable news is something you pay for. While he is only too aware that traditional news media are losing the fight against the social media giants, he saw the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a chance for newspapers like his to market themselves as bastions of transparency, journalistic rigour and balanced reporting.

Arets is a reader in Journalism and Responsible Innovation, who works with schools and local governments on developing ways improve digital literacy and resilience to disinformation, or in her terms “inoculating people against fake news”. Both op het Veld and Arets are sceptical about regulation since government cannot be regarded as neutral arbiters.

At the same time, it seems naïve to rely on individual virtue when swathes of the population get their news mainly from advertising platforms that generate revenue by maximising engagement through displaying the kind of news the algorithm deems most likely to provoke strong emotional reactions. This is, of course, not to insinuate that e.g. Facebook is in any way political – but it has created the perfect toolkit for political manipulation, and is happy to rent it out to the highest bidder.

Brkan herself has become much more careful: “I personally only agree to basic cookie function on the internet, I try to consult different news sources and I don’t rely on Facebook at all for political information.” Electoral behaviour is, of course, complex and there are a many factors and many steps prior to an individual’s decisions. “Still, we need to protect the individual and legislation will have to be involved in that.”

Brkan calls for transparency and labelling: “If you see sponsored content you have to know who paid for it and based on what information it is shown to you specifically.” If that doesn’t work, she suggests we might want to limit targeting altogether, or at least limit it to the most general criteria and avoid psychographic targeting based on sensitive data. Of course, legislation is no silver bullet: “Enforcement would be very difficult… Also, we should think it through properly; any kind of regulations would have to be very well designed to address the threat that targeted political advertising poses to democracy and freedom of elections.”