With the 2024 U.S. election and major political contests around the world looming, online companies are unprepared for the onslaught of misinformation to come.
That’s according to research released Tuesday by Mozilla and CheckFirst, which finds leading tech platforms lagging behind in ad transparency tools.The study, conducted between December and January, tested alphabetical Google search and YouTube, apple app store and Microsoft’s Bing and LinkedIn and services from Yuan, interest, breakTikTok, X, etc.
None of the results were great, and some were “very disappointing,” the researchers said.
The ad transparency tool is mandated by the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires big tech platforms to maintain ad libraries and other tools, such as application programming interfaces (APIs), for use by researchers and the public. The deadline for DSA is January 1st.
People should be able to use these tools to search for information about the ads they see or a specific company’s advertising campaign, including the ad content, target audience, ad reach and calls to action.
“It’s no longer a voluntary thing,” Claire Pershan, Mozilla’s head of EU advocacy, told CNBC. “It’s something these companies have to do.”
No platform passed the test for the “Ready for Action” designation. Instead, the results ranged from a lack of significant data and functionality to “remaining large gaps” in data and functionality. Research shows that some people only achieve “the bare minimum.”
This is troubling news as platforms prepare for a crucial election year affecting more than 4 billion people in more than 40 countries.
Amaury Lesplingart, co-founder and head of technology at CheckFirst, said in an interview with CNBC: “Because of the election year, real cooperation between the platforms is very important, and it is also very important that we promote cooperation now.
The rise of artificial intelligence and AI-generated content has led to serious election-related misinformation concerns, with the amount of deep fake content generated increasing 900% year-on-year, according to data from machine learning company Clarity.Election-related misinformation has been a major problem dating back to the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russian actors seeking deployment A cheap and easy way to spread inaccurate content on social platforms.
Lawmakers are now more concerned about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
“There are legitimate concerns about how artificial intelligence can mislead voters in campaigns,” California Democratic state Sen. Josh Becker told CNBC in February.
New research determines that the tools provided by Lesplingart told CNBC that users must know the advertiser name, target country and ad date in order to export to an ad profile.
“Given that X (formerly Twitter) remains a central space for civil discourse, we are perhaps most disappointed to see such a meager effort from X (formerly Twitter),” the researchers wrote. “This may be why the European Commission Incorporate X’s ad repository into the DSA’s formal proceedings against the platform.”
Bing, Snapchat, Alibaba’s AliExpress and Zalando also had the lowest scores.Alphabet, Pinterest and Booking.com Earned the second lowest title. Apple’s App Store, LinkedIn, Meta and TikTok received higher scores, although they still have “huge gaps” in data and functionality.
“Our main conclusion is that even the best methods fall short of our baseline,” the researchers wrote.
Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest, X, Alibaba and Zalando did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Regarding Alphabet’s transparency tools for Google search and YouTube, researchers said that “six years later, we still can’t search by keyword.” They reported accuracy issues and missing data on Pinterest and TikTok. They discovered that users were unable to search for words with special characters on Bing’s tools.
Research shows that Apple’s App Store tools prevent users and researchers from seeing ad campaigns broken down by targeted country, an important feature for tracking election-related disinformation.
“The effectiveness of these tools depends on their usefulness to researchers in practice,” the researchers wrote. They added, “But we also want to consider the glass half full and look forward to further improvements.”
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