The barriers to regulating the online world: Insights from UK debates on online political advertising

Abstract

Online political advertising has grown rapidly over the last two decades and played an important role in campaigns and elections. Arising with it are concerns around issues such as data privacy and transparency, which have sparked calls for regulation. Whilst change has begun to be implemented, in many contexts moves to regulate online political advertising have been limited. In this article, we explore one such case, asking whether attempts to regulate have been hindered by the particular characteristics of digital technology or by wider political factors. Presenting new interview data examining the experiences and perceptions of regulators, policy makers, civil servants, civil society groups and academics in the United Kingdom, we distil three barriers: political reticence, logistical challenges and conflicting policy proposals. Our findings suggest that efforts to regulate online phenomena need to apply a media and politics-centric lens, considering how the technological traits of digital media and political factors can affect efforts to regulate.

What makes online political ads unacceptable? Interrogating public attitudes to inform regulatory responses

“…This data allows us to consider the potential value of extending existing regulatory principles to online political ads. And yet, we note the current reticence towards such activities from stakeholders within this space (Dommett & Zhu, 2022). For this reason, we consider a further possible response: the development of a code of conduct.…”

“…Examining the resonance of principles used to regulate nonpolitical advertising we find that ads are often deemed more acceptable when they are seen to comply with existing regulatory protocols for non-political advertising, suggesting the value of extending existing oversight systems. However, noting reticence to act in this space (Dommett & Zhu, 2022), we also consider the potential of a code of conduct -a practice currently being explored in the Netherlands (International IDEA, 2020) and Germany (Jaursch, 2020).…”

Influence government, platform power and the patchwork profile: Exploring the appropriation of targeted advertising infrastructures for government behaviour change campaigns

“…The mechanisms by which this targeting is facilitated involve a huge intermediary industry of data sources and algorithmic imputation of interests and behaviours (often branded as AI) (van der Vlist and Helmond, 2021). The behavioural-data based targeted advertising approach has been under considerable regulatory scrutiny in recent years (Deshpande, et al, 2022), related to misinformation, political influence (Dommett and Zhu, 2022), public health (Goodwin, 2022), competition (U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, 2020), and privacy (Sartor, et al, 2021). It is also a moving target; the affordances, practices, and regulations are constantly changing.…”

Regulatory capacity capture: the United Kingdom’s online safety regime

“…Tracing regulatory processes, scholars show that factors like electoral considerations, regulatory activism pursued by influential politicians and logistical constraints, for example around parliamentary schedules, impact platform regulation Gorwa, 2021). In the UK context, Dommett and Zhu (2022) find that policymakers have struggled to harmonise and find consensus around conflicting policy proposals for an online safety regime, and this has caused delays. Experts have also connected delays to Covid-19 and the 2022 government leadership crisis and, coming along with it, constant turnover in the position of the DCMS Secretary of State (Hern, 2022;Kent et al, 2020).…”

“…To reveal context-rich descriptions of regulatory processes within a case, interview-based methods are frequently used in platform regulation scholarship, for example to study regulatory contexts in Australia (Duguay et al, 2020), Germany (Gorwa, 2021), the UK (Dommett, 2021;Dommett & Zhu, 2022), and the United…”