Struggling Over Political Advertising: EU Regulation and Platform Policies in the Global Information disorder

A progressive agenda of internet governance is currently defined by the European Union. The EU defends its legitimate interest to safeguard European democracy, promote free and fair elections and uphold electoral rights of EU citizens in national and European elections. In this paper, we analyse how the agenda of election integrity is combined with the agenda of information integrity to present the world’s first encompassing platform regulation, including binding rules and sanctions of online advertisement and the placement of political content. While there are good reasons to regulate social media platforms by expanding EU competences, also concerns have been expressed that interventions into free campaigning and advertisement could dry up public debate and restrict freedom of speech. Empirically, the paper will look therefore at the contested field of EU regulatory action. On the one hand, we need to understand how the EU uses its definitional and agenda-setting power to define new risks related to the spread of disinformation, the interference of foreign powers, and the use of AI and algorithms in political campaigning to justify the urgency of political intervention. On the other hand, we need to understand how the EU risk approach to public communication is mobilising resistance by states, by tech companies, and, most recently, also by a number of social and political actors.