Into the light

ELECTION campaigns should be fought in the open. Voters should freely make up their minds on the basis of arguments openly presented.

This is a principle fundamental to the workings of democracy; but some forms of online advertising threaten to subvert it.

In particular, micro-targeted advertising where the message is only seen by a carefully selected audience makes it too easy for politicians to make incompatible promises to different audiences, without anyone being able to check and correlate all of their messages.

More worrying still is the claim that it aids the production of carefully targeted voter suppression ads, designed not to persuade people to vote for one party, but not to vote at all.

By their nature these claims are hard to check. Despite the excellent work being done by groups such as Who Targets Me, we don’t know and can’t at present measure the extent of such advertising.

The “filter bubbles” in which voters of interest can be found are very small indeed. Openly and spontaneously spread material has to be worth more than a message that only reaches paid audiences.

The Electoral Commission has proposed that all online political advertisements be clearly labelled with the name of the promoter, as was done in the Scottish independence referendum. We could go further: the parties themselves should be obliged to publish, perhaps on the Electoral Commission website, every advertisement they place on social media. There need be no obligation for any advertiser to explain who was the targeted audience, something that can legitimately be seen as a kind of trade secret.

But everyone would be able to see all of the messages that were aimed at any voter on social media. Voters must make up their own minds and can’t be shielded from that responsibility.

But they deserve the materials from which to make their own judgment.