While the new European rules impose strict transparency obligations on large web platforms, the latter are clearly not making enough effort according to a new report.
Having become a subject of political debate in their own right, advertisements displayed on the web continue to operate quite opaquely. In any case, this is what a report published by the Mozilla foundation (which publishes the Firefox browser) and the company Check First, specializing in the fight against disinformation, suggests.
A need for transparency
While the Digital Services Act (DSA) requires that “ access controllers» make available to the public and NGOs their “advertising libraries», Most large platforms are dragging their feet in the face of this new obligation. A rather embarrassing shaky compliance at the moment when “elections will take place in the EU and around the world“, explains Mozilla.
Concretely, the DSA requires that the advertising register of each platform makes it possible to identify“the natural or legal person who paid for the advertising” And “the natural or legal person on whose behalf the advertising is presented“. Unfortunately, this information is not always easy to find.
X (ex-Twitter) very bad student
According to the report published by Mozilla, the relevance and usefulness of these advertising registers “vary greatly between platforms“. At X for example, the database does exist, but in the form of a .csv file that is complex to analyze and which contains little relevant information. A “major disappointment» for Mozilla and Ckeck First. The situation is not much better at Bing which offers a web interface incapable of understanding accented characters, or at Google which does not even allow a keyword search. Only LinkedIn and TikTok seem to be doing somewhat well.
A global situation which still makes Mozilla say that no platform is “able to meet the needs of research teams» due in particular to the complete lack of interoperability which prevents us from having a quick and complete overview of the large multi-platform communications operations of certain brands or certain companies. Mozilla still emphasizes that the DSA has forced each platform to put its advertising library online, which is nevertheless progress. A way of seeing the glass half full.
Source : Mozilla
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