Thursday, April 04, 2019
Following the money on pro-Brexit Facebook adverts
The Guardian reveals that a series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns that appear to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit are being secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson.
The paper says that the mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in reality they share an administrator who works for Crosby’s CTF Partners and have spent as much as £1m promoting sophisticated targeted adverts aimed at heaping pressure on individual MPs to vote for a hard Brexit:
Repeated questions have been raised about who is backing at least a dozen high-spending groups that have flooded MPs’ inboxes with calls to reject Theresa May’s deal. Until now they were thought to be independent entities.
But according to the documents, almost all the major pro-Brexit Facebook “grassroots” advertising campaigns in the UK share the same page admins or advertisers. These individuals include employees of CTF Partners and the political director of Boris Johnson’s campaigns to be mayor of London, who has worked closely with Crosby in the past.
Their collective Facebook expenditure swamps the amount spent in the last six months by all the UK’s major political parties and the UK government combined. They have paid for thousands of different targeted Facebook ads encouraging members of the public to write to their local MPs and call for the toughest possible exit from the EU, creating the impression of organic public opposition to Theresa May’s deal.
Improved regulation by Facebook does not appear to have had any impact on these tactics. The Guardian says that although the internet giant has substantially increased the level of transparency around political advertising in recent months, all that is required to run such a campaign is a publicly named individual who is registered to a UK postal address or contact details for a public organisation. There is no true disclosure around a campaign’s financial backers and no UK law requiring financial transparency outside an election period.
Surely, it is time for the law to be reformed.
The paper says that the mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in reality they share an administrator who works for Crosby’s CTF Partners and have spent as much as £1m promoting sophisticated targeted adverts aimed at heaping pressure on individual MPs to vote for a hard Brexit:
Repeated questions have been raised about who is backing at least a dozen high-spending groups that have flooded MPs’ inboxes with calls to reject Theresa May’s deal. Until now they were thought to be independent entities.
But according to the documents, almost all the major pro-Brexit Facebook “grassroots” advertising campaigns in the UK share the same page admins or advertisers. These individuals include employees of CTF Partners and the political director of Boris Johnson’s campaigns to be mayor of London, who has worked closely with Crosby in the past.
Their collective Facebook expenditure swamps the amount spent in the last six months by all the UK’s major political parties and the UK government combined. They have paid for thousands of different targeted Facebook ads encouraging members of the public to write to their local MPs and call for the toughest possible exit from the EU, creating the impression of organic public opposition to Theresa May’s deal.
Improved regulation by Facebook does not appear to have had any impact on these tactics. The Guardian says that although the internet giant has substantially increased the level of transparency around political advertising in recent months, all that is required to run such a campaign is a publicly named individual who is registered to a UK postal address or contact details for a public organisation. There is no true disclosure around a campaign’s financial backers and no UK law requiring financial transparency outside an election period.
Surely, it is time for the law to be reformed.
Comments:
<< Home
Do you believe that any of this expenditure will appear on the returns of the next Leave campaign if there is to be a public confirmatory vote? (The fact that the government has devised its own jargon for what we know as The People's Vote suggests that this is more likely than not.)
Post a Comment
<< Home
