Securing Democracy: Online Political Advertising Regulations and Practices in the EU and its Member States

Starting with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and its link to Brexit and the 2016 US elections, the nexus among online political advertising, micro-targeting, and data-driven electoral campaigning has revealed its disruptive potential for democracies. While facilitating innovative modes of direct engagement between politics and citizens, online political advertising also allows parties and other political actors to enact strategies that can effectively target highly specific audience segments, with a potential for domestic players with populist agendas or foreign actors to exploit these technologies in order to disrupt public debate and manipulate key electoral processes. However, few countries in Europe introduced a regulation in this respect, to the extent that the digital environment has often been likened to a Wild West. This study has a two-fold aim. First, it presents an up-to-date comparative analysis of the regulation of political advertising in the European Union as well as in individual European countries showing similarities and differences across countries and levels. Second, it provides a descriptive analysis of the way in which domestic political actors used online political advertisements during the 2024 European election campaign exploring which political families use these strategies more frequently and how much they economically invested in advertising tools.