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There’s been a lot of condemnation for Labour’s recent tweet about the conviction rate for child sexual assault under the Tories.
The focus has been on the low tone of the “ad”, arguing that it drags politics even lower.
This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Labour has been running a campaign on crime rates ahead of the local elections. They want to show toughness and resolve. Furthermore, someone at Labour probably thought they needed to fire a shot across the bows of the Tories, to let them know that Isaac Leviedo et al weren’t going to be able to constantly drag up bad examples from Keir Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions. (Perhaps we’re overthinking it, but you can read this not as an attack aimed at persuading voters, but instead aimed at dissuading the Tory campaign operation from going there).
Of course the post, and the campaign as a whole, hasn’t passed without comment. We’ll see a weekend of op-eds about it, ensuring the tweet becomes far more famous than it would otherwise be, with lots of conclusions being drawn (“this harms politics”, “this harms Starmer”, “it looks desperate”, “people won’t remember the controversy, but they’ll remember what Labour said about Sunak” and more).
Then things will move on, someone at Labour will get told off, and the party will decide to rein it in for a while.
To be clear, this isn’t one of those op-eds, so let’s change tack a little and make a broader point.
Many people commenting on the tweet are calling it an “ad”. It’s an easy mistake to make. It looks like an ad - a graphic designer worked it up, it looks a bit like a poster, it’s carried on a social media network where advertising is quite pervasive (though it hasn’t been posted on Facebook, where political advertising is really pervasive).
But, to the best of our knowledge, the party hasn’t paid to print it. It’s not on a poster, or dropping through people’s letterboxes this weekend. Currently, it’s not in the Facebook Ad Library, telling us that, so far, Labour hasn’t decided to stick any money behind it in order to reach a target audience. It’s just a tweet that sits outside the boundaries of what Labour normally says and, as a result, people are talking about it.
Calling a tweet an “ad” might not sound like a major problem, but doing so can lead to problems down the line.
The first problem is over-definition.
Most of the people who pay to amplify political speech online are political parties and politicians. On the other hand, most of the people who say things about politics on the internet for free are… normal people.
Over the last few months, the EU has been drafting a new Political Advertising Regulation. It’s currently in final negotiations, before adoption later in the year. The definition of an “ad” is key to the success of the new law. If an “ad” is thought of as a paid message, it will mostly capture parties and politicians in its scope. If the definition is broadened to include “any message of a political nature” (paid or not), lots and lots of people will suddenly be in scope, and will find themselves subject to the regulation’s transparency and verification requirements.
If this happens, many people will simply stop talking about politics in order to avoid being regulated. A loose definition will harm free expression and political debate.
The second problem is that the system is working, but some people still want more.
Under new “digital imprints” regulations in the UK, political social media posts near to elections must clearly identify who they’re by. In this case, it’s absolutely clear it’s a Labour Party tweet. It’s from their main account and it says it’s by them in the corner of the graphic. Because of this, it’s trivially easy for people to hold the party accountable for their decision to post it.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, as Shadow Ministers are finding out in this weekend’s media appearances.
But the controversy about the “ad” contributes to the idea there should be a solution to the fact that political parties sometimes create and post disagreeable political communications. Whether it’s the big number on the side of the Brexit bus, or the Tories using “Green Party Green” (Farrow and Ball should sue) on some recent election leaflets, there’s a perception the UK needs to do more to regulate the content of what parties say to voters.
It’s at this point we all need to be very, very careful. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The risk of dangerous over-reach that harms free expression by creating impractical, expensive, dysfunctional, fragile regulatory systems for vetting political content is extremely high. And if such systems are weaponised by political enemies, we’ll regret they were ever created at all.
No system is perfect, but as we can see from Labour’s post, the idea that politicians can say things online with impunity simply isn’t true. The media, fact checkers and the public all try to impose costs on those who step outside the norms of political communication. At the ballot box, voters can do the same.
Sometimes this system doesn’t work as well as we want it to. Lies occasionally outrun the truth. But the answer isn’t to regulate the content of political communications, it’s for us all to try and get fitter and faster, so that we can more easily catch up.
If there’s a lesson for all of us from this tweet (remember, not an “ad”), it’s this.
Ad spending by UK parties over the last week
We’re working on a post about the local elections for next week, but in the meantime, here’s how much parties spent on Meta ads over the 7 days to April 5th.
The most striking thing here is that, with the focus on their “small boats” policy now gone, the Conservatives have dropped off the radar, returning to their prior stance of not buying any ads at all using their major pages - everything is at the discretion of individual local parties and candidates. Labour is much, much more active.
On YouTube, Scottish Labour spent £750 on four ads featuring Anas Sarwar.
More from us towards the end of next week… see you then.
Team Full Disclosure
P.s. Don’t forget to install the Who Targets Me browser extension to help us track and understand how people experience online political advertising during election campaigns. It’s free, and totally anonymous.