Heading into the 2024 US election and major political contests around the world, internet companies are unprepared for the onslaught of misinformation to come.
That’s according to research released Tuesday by Mozilla and CheckFirst, which concludes that leading tech platforms are lagging behind in ad transparency tools. The study, conducted between December and January, was tested The alphabet Google Search and YouTube, of Apple App Store and of Microsoft Bing and LinkedIn, as well as services from After, Pinterest, BreakTikTok, X and others.
None of the results were outstanding, and some were “a big disappointment,” according to the researchers.
The ad transparency tools were mandated by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which required major tech platforms to maintain ad libraries and other tools, such as application programming interfaces (APIs), to be used by researchers and the public. The DSA deadline was January 1st.
Users should be able to use the tools to search for information about the ads they see or the advertising campaigns of specific companies, including ad content, target audience, ad reach, and call to action.
“This is no longer something that is voluntary,” Claire Pershan, head of EU support at Mozilla, told CNBC. “It’s something these companies have to do.”
No platform passed the “action-ready” test. Instead, the results ranged from missing vital data and functionality, to “still has big gaps” in data and functionality. Some had “the bare minimum,” according to the study.
It’s troubling news as major platforms prepare for a huge election year affecting over 4 billion people in over 40 countries.
“It’s important right now that the platforms really work together, and it’s important for us to push right now because of the election year,” Amaury Lesplingart, co-founder and chief technology officer of CheckFirst, told CNBC.
The rise of artificial intelligence and AI-generated content has led to serious concerns about election-related disinformation, with the number of deepfakes created increasing by 900% each year, according to data from the machine learning firm Clarity. Election-related disinformation has been a major problem dating back to the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russian actors sought to develop cheap and easy ways to spread inaccurate content on social media platforms.
Lawmakers are currently even more concerned with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
“There is serious concern about how artificial intelligence could be used to mislead voters in campaigns,” Josh Becker, a California Democratic senator, told CNBC in an interview in February.
The new research determined that the tools offered by X were a “big disappointment”, as the company only offered a CSV file instead of a web interface, making it difficult to search for ads. Lesplingart told CNBC that users needed to know the name of the advertiser, the targeted country and the date of the ad in order to export to an ad file.
“We are perhaps most disappointed to see X (formerly Twitter) making such a minimal effort, given that it remains a central space for political discourse,” the researchers wrote. “This may be why the European Commission has included X’s ad repository in its official proceedings against the platform under the DSA.”
Bing, Snapchat, Alibaba’s AliExpress and Zalando also received the lowest scores. Alphabet, Pinterest and Booking.com received the second lowest ratings. Apple’s App Store, LinkedIn, Meta and TikTok received higher marks, although they were rated as still having “large gaps” in data and functionality.
“Our main finding is that even the best approaches fall short of our baseline,” the researchers wrote.
Regarding Alphabet’s transparency tools for Google Search and YouTube, the researchers said “it’s been six years and we still can’t do a keyword search.” They reported accuracy issues and missing data on Pinterest and TikTok. In Bing’s tools, users can’t search for words with special characters, they found.
For Apple’s App Store tools, users and researchers can’t see ad campaigns broken down by target country, an important feature for tracking election-related disinformation, according to the study.
“The effectiveness of these tools depends on their usefulness to researchers in practice,” the researchers wrote. They added, “But we’d also like to consider the glass half full and look forward to further improvements.”