📄Webinar "Transparency in European Elections"

Transparency is a key principle for credible elections. Independent verification of political campaigning and electoral processes by electoral stakeholders, whether political parties, election observers or voters, strengthens trust and public confidence in elections free of irregularities or mal-intended interference. As online political advertising has become increasingly important in campaigning, its regulation and oversight has been largely missing at EU and MS levels.

Panelists pointed out that key concerns such as the protection of personal data, the secrecy of the ballot, combating algorithms that discriminate against women and minorities, and the full implementation of a human rights-based approach remain. A human rights-based approach has not yet been fully implemented. CSOs have played a key role in shaping the new legal framework for elections, but have been faced with problems with shrinking civil society space or lack of recognition. The webinar provided a wide audience of experts and non-experts with further information and insight on this very relevant and forthcoming file.

Recommendations of the webinar:

• Pursue a human rights-based approach to regulate political advertising in order to protect fundamental freedoms, democratic processes and open government.

• Enable timely passage and full implementation of a new regulatory framework of political advertising ahead of the 2024 EP elections in all 27 EU MS. Create clarity on the definition of political advertising to cover only sponsored political content and not all political content.

• Consider effective sanctions and sanctions enforcement mechanism by all EU MS, the Commission and EU agencies, as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Services Act (DSA).

• Put in place measures to enforce detailed and timely reporting to electoral authorities on campaign financing and advertising.

• Strengthen oversight institutions at EU level like the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and at EU MS level like national data/media monitoring and regulating authorities.

• Protect personal data, which should not be used without consent, including for the purposes of political advertising and micro-targeting. Default consent to third-party companies and cross-platform tracking should be prohibited. Individuals should be informed in a clear and transparent manner why they are seeing certain advertisements and who has paid for them.

• Make all political online advertisements easily accessible and searchable, containing detailed information about sponsor, source and amount of the funds involved, number of users reached, as well as specific targeting parameters that were used.

• Expand and protect the space for civil society organisations to operate, including by fully recognising the positive role of non-partisan election observation as well as of ad tech platforms monitoring before, during and after elections, including through granting accreditations.

You can find the full webinar uploaded online here.

The project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.