Debate: Transparency and targeting of political advertising
Date: MONDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2024
Speaker: Věra Jourová
Language: EN

It is a key step to achieve a high standard of transparency in our elections and our politics, alongside robust, specific protections for personal data. It is also a crucial piece of legislation to tie together our world-leading data protection rules with our new digital and media market laws for this very sensitive and crucial area in this election year.  Let me in the remaining time react on several contributions. First of all, on Ms Niebler and Mr Schwab, which was a very relevant point regarding proportionality. I will quote Ms Niebler that these are ‘too far-reaching’ rules. Well, I believe that even the municipal and regional elections should have the rule which will give the people, the voters, the right to know who pays the ads and who is behind the campaigns, because this is the elementary request of having full transparency.  So the question is: how big the elections should be to be accompanied by transparency rules? In our view, it should apply to all elections, because in all elections, transparency and information for the citizens matter. Mr Bielan and Ms Tóth, there is absolutely no censorship embedded into this proposal. Ms Tóth, it does not ignore national interests. First and foremost, it protects the autonomous and well-informed choice of the citizens, which is absolutely important in the EU and in all the Member States, be it Belgium, France, the Czech Republic and even Hungary.  Ms Grapini: yes, this regulation does not contain any measures against the dirty money. But we have other pieces of legislation, and in the national rules there is the role of the national authorities to monitor the financing of the political campaigns. I think that our regulation – which will shed light on who pays and how much, how the campaigns are being paid – will help the authorities to trace the possible dirty money which is being invested in the political campaigns. On disinformation and deep fakes: indeed, we live in the era of new risks posed to the political campaigns. We have rules in the Digital Services Act which oblige the digital platforms to pay attention to those possible risks. We need to have active civil society and media to address the disinformation in the political campaigns, because it used to be a good rule that when political actors are caught lying, they are disqualified. We are not there anymore. But at least there should be some public activity to do the necessary fact-checking of this information before the elections.  As for the deepfakes, Big Tech came recently in Munich with the common commitment to label or remove deepfakes in the political campaigns. But at the same time, I have to say that I expect from the political parties the behaviour in the way or in the sense of refraining from the usage of deepfakes. And in this sense, I sent a letter to the European political parties. We also had a discussion with them, with the secretariats, and I asked them to address the national political parties. In other words, the political actors first and foremost should resist the temptation of the manipulative techniques such as deepfakes.  Once again, thank you very much, and I hope tomorrow’s vote will turn out well.