Are the advertising transparency tools of major digital platforms really… transparent? No, say in a joint report, published Tuesday April 16, the Mozilla Foundation, publisher of the Firefox browser, and the company Checkfirst, specializing in tools to combat disinformation.
The two organizations scrutinized the “ad libraries” offered by the eleven major platforms to which European legislation imposes specific transparency obligations, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, AliExpress and Zalando – Amazon temporarily benefits from ‘an exemption. These tools are supposed to allow ordinary citizens, such as journalists or law enforcement, to examine the nature of the advertisements disseminated there, in particular to verify that they are not illegal or misleading content.
In practice, the advertising libraries of these large companies lack functionality or are almost unusable. The report is particularly critical of the tools deployed by AliExpress, Zalando, Bing (Microsoft), Snapchat and X: the search engine set up by Bing does not accept accented characters; Snapchat offers a fairly complete and reliable advertising library, but does not allow you to search by keywords; As for X, its transparency tool has so many restrictions on use that it is, in practice, almost unusable.
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“One step forward, two steps back”
Comparatively, Apple, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok are doing better, but problems persist, note the Mozilla Foundation and Checkfirst. Facebook and Instagram’s ad transparency tool is one of the most convenient to use and comprehensive, but both organizations found notable errors in ad indexing. TikTok’s suffers from similar errors. The report is more severe towards Alphabet (parent company of the Google search engine and YouTube), whose tool “has progressed, but, six years after its implementation, it is still not possible to search by keyword”. This also makes it almost unusable.
In several cases, the Mozilla Foundation and Checkfirst believe that large platforms have “take one step forward, two steps back”. For example, X has largely backed down on the data made available since its acquisition by Elon Musk. “This may be why the European Commission included X’s advertising library in the points raised by its formal procedure against the platform”write the authors of the report.
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