Opinion piece: regulation of online political advertising

Olivier Braet (senior researcher at imec-SMIT-VUB) and Pieter Ballon (director of imec-SMIT-VUB and professor at VUB) wrote an article on better regulation of online political advertising. The article was published in ‘De Standaard’ on the 5th of June and responds to the following news item.

SUMMARY OF ARTICLE

In short, the authors argue for:

Transparancy on which specific personal characteristics a political advertisement was shown to you;
The ability to see if different messages were shown to people with different personal profiles;
Initiatives taken by platforms such as Facebook to expose visitors to random messages – even when you are a committed member of a particular party, you should occasionally see other opinions.

Want to read more? Visit the website of ‘de Standaard’.

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Pieter Ballon

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Pieter Ballon is Professor in Communication Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is the Director of the research group imec-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technologies). Prof. Ballon holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and an MA in Modern History. He is the co-founder of the European Network of Living Labs, the Open Agile […]

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Private: Olivier Braet

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The most important bottlenecks for the adoption of new technologies are never only technological. Just as often, they depend on the industrial forces on the supply side, and shifting consumer preferences on the demand side. One of my main concerns is understanding how various industrial forces such as strategic behaviour or business model choices can […]

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