Change is urgently needed after this dire Pinocchio election

The public has had a cloud of deceit thrown at them. It’s time to regulate political advertising. But the social media giants must also face up to their own responsibilities, writes James Moore

Reform must follow the Pinocchio election (Disney)

You could call the 2019 general election the Pinocchio campaign (note to Boris Johnson’s dad Stanley – this council-house kid can spell that) such was the level of misinformation and deceit that was spread.

Much of it was delivered through advertising. Last week, the Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising branded the ads the nation was (mis)treated to as “indecent, dishonest and untruthful” in a report entitled How Political Advertising in the 2019 General Election Let Us Down.

The non-partisan organisation – one of the more worthy recipients of crowdfunding that I’ve seen – highlighted ads from the Tories, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party, while providing an explanation for why each example was problematic.

The campaign’s co-founder Alex Tait, who used to work in consumer products group Unilever’s marketing department, told me that the sellers of washing powder have more rules imposed upon them than politicians. And given what Unilever sells, he should know.

His point is that it would be illegal for, say, SuperWash to claim its powder “delivers whiter whites” without proof. And rightly so. But if you did see an ad making that claim on YouTube and you bought the product on the back of it, it’d probably do the job of washing your clothes.

Politicians can, by contrast, straight up lie with impunity. But there’s no guarantee they’ll do the job if you buy into their unverified claims. The consequences for voters that do that can be far more serious than simply buying a washing powder that doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

Tait and his coalition, stress that they are not anti advertising. To the contrary. They just want to see political ads brought under the auspices of the Advertising Standards Agency so that any claims made are accurate.

And they should be.

Twitter wouldn’t need to ban political ads if they were regulated. YouTube wouldn’t need to impose the restrictions that it has. Facebook… well the less said about its relative tolerance of misinformation the better.

Trouble is for that to happen it requires the politicians that have indulged in this dirty game to allow a referee onto the pitch, the Conservatives in particular, because I’m not going to make the mistake of claiming that they are all as bad as each other. They aren’t. There is a worst offender and it wears blue.

Disinformation tracking organisation First Draft, in another report, found that 88 per cent of the most widely circulated Tory ads on Facebook during the first four days of December included inaccurate claims. Some Labour claims have also been debunked, and the Coalition found problems, but First Draft wasn’t able to find similar falsehoods put up on the biggest social media platform by the party during the period under scrutiny (it should be said that Labour was less active).

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and that’s the trouble with trying to get politicians to act on this. It is for that reason we shouldn’t let the kingpins of the digital conversation off the hook. They have a corporate, and a social, responsibility to live up to here and they are failing to do so.

The problem is by no means unique to Britain.

The fog of falsehood on social media is imperilling democracy worldwide. If that doesn’t move the dial for them, they might like to consider that it is potentially imperilling their businesses, which thrive on the free exchange of information and opinion.

Progressive minded asset managers, which take their roles as stewards seriously, might like to consider doing their part by proposing and/or supporting shareholder resolutions. The quagmire that has developed on social media – which goes way beyond ads – doesn’t do anyone any favours.

Such resolutions are doomed to fail because of Silicon Valley’s preference for dual voting class shares that concentrate power in the hands of the people who run these companies. Still, combined with a process of engagement, and public pressure, it could at least make some of them think. Twitter could do more (as they all could) but it at least acted on ads. The company also called out the Conservative Party for renaming its Twitter feed FactcheckUK. So it can be done.

It needs to be. We are in a dangerous place right now. A response is required from the giants of Silicon Valley as well as from politicians.