Online platforms have gaping holes in their transparency ahead of the June European Parliament elections, according to a report released on Tuesday (16 April) by the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox browser.
The upcoming elections have made the issue of transparency all the more pressing as threats of disinformation and foreign interference are high.
The Mozilla Foundation called on CheckFirst to conduct stress tests evaluating whether platforms’ transparency tools are “ready for action.”
The report focused on the ad repositories of AliExpress, X, Amazon, Bing, Snapchat, Zalando, Google, YouTube, Booking.com, Pinterest, Apple’s App Store, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram’s Meta, and TikTok.
Advertising repositories are databases where platforms store information about ads shown on their sites. These are usually available through web and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The latter connects applications like an ad repository with researchers’ analysis tools.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark content moderation rulebook, mandates that ad repositories are publicly available.
Some platforms have pushed back on this requirement. Aylo, the parent company of several pornography sites, told Euractiv in March that it considers the DSA’s requirement for publicly available ad repositories to be illegal. It is one of the reasons why it is suing the European Commission.
The stress tests
Mozilla and CheckFirst’s stress tests checked “the robustness, reliability, and effectiveness of the ad repositories under various conditions and loads, to mimic real-world demands”, the non-profit wrote in its report.
The report deemed these databases inadequate for researchers due to functional limitations and lack of compatibility among platforms. It also pointed out that the interfaces are not mutually compatible, making it harder for researchers to identify trends across platforms.
Euractiv reached out for comment to all platforms included in the report. They either declined or did not answer by the time of publication. Pinterest, however, pointed out that it does not allow political ads.
Mozilla suggested that online platforms improve their ad repository interfaces for easier access and use, while making the available data more comprehensive and clearly documented.
Political advertising
Mozilla’s research also touches on an EU legislative deal on political advertising reached in November, aimed at increasing transparency in political advertising, especially online, to prevent manipulation of electoral processes.
The tools mandated by legislation are not perfect but provide a starting point, Mozilla’s EU Advocacy Lead Claire Pershan told Euractiv.
“Recent DSA guidance on elections and the recently agreed regulation on political ads transparency will further enhance these transparency tools concerning political content, so now is a time for companies, researchers, and regulators to collaborate,” she told Euractiv.
Katja Muñoz, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology pointed out in a March episode of Euractiv’s Tech Brief podcast that researchers face difficulties predicting elections due to restricted access to social media data.
Platforms have shifted away from transparency in recent years, with layoffs and changes in ownership worsening the problem, Muñoz said, bringing up X’s takeover by Elon Musk in 2022.
She said that despite legislative efforts like the DSA, researchers still struggle to obtain data.
