A Cross-Country Analysis of Electoral Advertising on Meta and Google during the EU 2024 Elections: Compliance, Transparency, and Targeting
By Trisha Meyer
Across 15 EU countries during the April-June 2024 EU Parliament election window, roughly 30,000 political ads were published and about €8.7 million spent on Meta and Google political advertising. Meta’s and Google’s own definitions of ‘political advertising’ were found not fully aligned with the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising Regulation (2024/900), with both platforms only partially meeting its transparency and targeting-disclosure requirements.
Executive summary
AI-generatedThis summary was generated by AI from the original report to make it easier to scan and cite. It is not a substitute for the source. Read the original above.
Led by EDMO BELUX together with nine other EDMO hubs, this study compared how parties running in the 2024 European Parliament elections used Meta’s and Google’s political-advertising tools across fifteen member states. Researchers extracted and compared ad-library/API data on spend, volume, and targeting disclosures for the campaign period. The report concludes both platforms’ internal definitions of political advertising fall short of the EU’s new ad-transparency regulation and that transparency/targeting disclosures remain only partially compliant, with data access itself a persistent obstacle to independent verification.
Think this summary is wrong? Contact us.