Apple’s ad transparency tools aren’t sufficient to investigate issues like paid influence, says a new report, which also scored the effectiveness of 11 other tech companies’ tools.
Five companies – including social network X and Microsoft’s Bing search engine – scored close to zero, while Apple got a yellow rating indicating “big gaps” in the information provided …
EU law requires transparency with political ads
Nation states like Russia have been found to actively engage in interference with elections in both the US and Europe. Ads on social media and other tech platforms have been one of the tools used.
In the US, the CIA, FBI and NSA all agree that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election through fake social media posts, ads, and other activities, with countermeasures introduced in 2018.
In Europe, a new law came into effect last month requiring tech companies who sell ads – which includes Apple’s App Store – to be fully transparent about the political ads they permit.
[The law] aims to make it easy for citizens to recognise political advertisements, understand who is behind them and know whether they have received a targeted advertisement, so that they are better placed to make informed choices.
In addition to the transparency requirement, companies must also demonstrate that they have measures in place to reject ads from foreign governments in the three months leading up to any election or referendum.
Apple’s election ad disclosures not complying
Apple accepts ads on the App Store, including for political and ‘news’ apps, and thus falls within scope for the law.
Mozilla and CheckFirst carried out an analysis of the disclosures of 12 tech companies.
Mozilla and CheckFirst investigated AliExpress, Apple App Store, Bing, Booking.com, Alphabet’s Google Search & YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and Zalando. Researchers tested the transparency tools using over 20 parameters, including functionality, data accessibility, and accuracy.
They found that X was the worst.
“X’s transparency tools are an utter disappointment,” said Claire Pershan, EU Advocacy Lead at Mozilla. Its repository offers no filtering and sorting capabilities; ads can only be accessed through a cumbersome CSV export file; the content of ads is not disclosed (only a URL to the ads), and there are gaps in targeting parameters and recipient data. And searching for historical content is nearly impossible. All this may be why the European Commission has included X’s ad repository in its formal proceedings against the platform under the DSA [Digital Services Act].
Aliexpress, Bing, SnapChat, and Zalando all got the same red rating: ‘Lacks vital data and functionality.’
Apple got a yellow rating: ‘Still has big gaps in data and functionality.’
Apple, LinkedIn, and TikTok fared moderately better, but only by comparison — they also have big gaps in data and functionality. Most tools were hindered by search rate limits, poor sorting and filtering features, limited accessibility, and more.
This means that while the data may be in there somewhere, it is virtually impossible in practice to access it effectively. The researchers say that unless citizens can easily determine who paid for an ad, they have no way to judge the reliability of its claims.
If you see an ad telling you that climate change is a hoax, you might be interested to know if that ad’s paid for by the fossil fuel industry.
Update: Mozilla tells us that it assessed Apple’s ad transparency across all types of paid influence, not just overtly political ads.
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