On Tuesday 12 July, members of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (‘IMCO’) debated the report by Sandro Gozi (Renew Europe, Italian) on transparency and targeting of political advertising, after hearing from several experts on the same subject the day before (see EUROPE 12990/23).
Amongst other things, the report provides for keeping “the scope as broad as possible”, “excluding from the scope purely commercial private advertising”, and identifying “all actors in the supply chain of political advertising”, the rapporteur summarised.
In addition, Gozi’s report calls for “appropriate, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions”, and believes that the implementation of these future rules should not involve the creation of a new authority, but rather be based “on what already exists”.
Most MEPs stressed the importance of taking action in the area of transparency in political advertising. Mr Gozi’s report is nonetheless expected to be the subject of intense discussions on several aspects, starting with the scope and definitions.
“The scope should be clearly defined and changes should be made to the definitions to distinguish between editorial content and political advertising”, said Sabine Verheyen (EPP, Germany).
“The EPP does not like bans, they are not the solution. We prefer to rely on transparency, citizens could give their consent or not”, said Pablo Arias Echeverría (EPP, Spain).
Others, like Portuguese MEP Maria Manuel Leitão Marques (S&D), called for “all political advertisements to be included in the scope, regardless of the actors behind them”.
Finally, several other MEPs, such as Virgine Joron (Identity and Democracy, France), questioned how to deal with the communication of elected representatives on social networks when this is “part of the functions for which they were elected”, or like Anna Cavazzini (Greens/EFA, Germany) on the sending of bulk emails to lists of recipients.
Questions of targeting methods, the intertwining of the future text with existing legislation, such as the DSA (see EUROPE 12986/3), deadlines for information from suppliers or labelling and visible information on political content for users were also raised.
“How does one combine technological progress and democracy? This is our dilemma. We need the former and we need to preserve the latter”, Stélios Koúloglou (The Left, Greece) concluded, calling for more control over algorithms. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)