Digital Political Ethics
The Digital Political Ethics: Aligning Principles with Practice report is the fruit of a bipartisan effort to identify areas of agreement among key stakeholders concerning ethical principles and best practices in the conduct of digital campaigning in the United States. This report summarizes expert views and focuses on four broad ethical principles: prioritizing democratic participation, protecting election integrity, increasing transparency, and ensuring fairness and consistency in the application of rules (public and private) governing political speech on platforms. This report offers a set of recommendations to better align digital campaign practices with shared ethical principles.
Platform Ads
This report and accompanying web resources document what we know about how Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and Alphabet-owned platforms have differentially embraced their roles as governors of paid political speech. The web resources compare the platforms’ stated policies and ad targeting capabilities across over a dozen categories – and they will be a continually updated public-facing set of resources for journalists, regulators, and other stakeholders. The report outlines the five major take-aways we drew from these comparisons.
Legal and Regulatory Issues
This section outlines the legal and regulatory issues that impact digital politics, including laws regulating the content of election-related speech as well as sponsorship disclaimer requirements and record keeping requirements imposed on online platforms that disseminate political ads. This is a continually updated public-facing resource for journalists, regulators, and other stakeholders.
Ad Libraries
Facebook, Google, and Twitter all maintain archives of political advertisements run on their platforms since mid-2018. Their shared stated goal is to provide transparency into political advertising. We compare these ad transparency databases side-by-side to help stakeholders understand the varied comprehensiveness and functions of these ad transparency databases and provide some recommendations for what the standards governing ad transparency should be.
Contact
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