We want every UK voter to know who is paying to target them online during elections and referendums.

The amount of money spent on digital advertising is increasing with every election. But electoral law was written long before campaigning went digital.

While it must be clear who paid for printed election campaign advertising, no law covers these ads online.

We’re working with the UK’s governments and social media companies on their plans to make it clear to voters who is campaigning to influence them online.

Changes we want to see

Voters need:

  • all digital election ads and campaign materials to be clearly labelled with information about who promoted it
  • social media companies to have online databases of political ads

We want the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments to change the law so that we have:

  • better rules about how spending on digital election ads is reported to us, so that we can make sure campaigners follow the rules
  • bigger fines, if campaigners break the rules
  • stronger powers so we’ve got the right tools to regulate new ways of campaigning, like on social media channels or using online payment systems for campaign donations

What's happening now

Scottish government

New legislation has come into force in Scotland, covering digital election campaign material about parties and campaigners.

This means that both ‘paid for’ and 'unpaid' digital election campaign material must be clearly labelled with information about who is promoting it.

This legislation applies to all parties and campaigners at the May 2021 Scottish Parliament election.

UK and Welsh governments

Some of the election law-making powers are held separately by the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments. We have been working with them all as they think about how to regulate digital campaigning.

The UK government ran consultation on new rules that it wants to apply to digital election campaign material in England and Northern Ireland, and nationwide during UK Parliamentary general elections. Read our response to the consultation 

We are working with the Welsh government as it considers what approach to take.

We will publish further updates about these developments when they are available.

Social media companies

We also meet with social media companies regularly to discuss how election advertising can be made more transparent on their platforms. Facebook, Google and Snapchat have launched libraries of political ads in the UK.

We used those libraries to monitor who was running election adverts during the 2019 UK Parliamentary general election.

We made recommendations about election advertising on social media and digital platforms in our reports after the election. Read our UK Parliamentary general election report

Report: the rise of digital campaigning

In 2018, we wrote a report about the rise of digital campaigning in the UK.

We made recommendations to government to improve transparency of digital campaigning.

Read the full report