The rise of “dark advertising” — personalized advertisements increasingly powered by artificial intelligence that evade public scrutiny — means Australians face a murky information landscape going into the federal election.
It’s already happening and, combined with Australia’s failure to enact truth-in-advertising legislation and big tech’s backtracking on fact-checking, means voters are left vulnerable to ad-powered misinformation campaigns. And that’s not good for democracy.
Tackling misinformation requires legislative action, international collaboration, and continued pressure on platforms to open their systems to scrutiny. The failures of U.S. tech platforms during their own elections should serve as a clear warning to Australia that industry self-regulation is not an option.
Political advertising plays a pivotal role in shaping elections, even while it is shrouded in opacity and increasing misinformation.
In the lead-up to the 2025 federal election, a significant volume of deceptive advertising and digital content has already surfaced. That’s not surprising, given the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) limits its oversight to the official campaign period, meaning false claims can proliferate freely before the official campaign.
At the heart of this challenge lies the evolution of digital political advertising.
Modern campaigns rely heavily on social media platforms, leveraging associative ad models that tap into beliefs or interests to deliver digital advertising. Unlike traditional media, where ads are visible to all and subject to better regulatory and market scrutiny, digital ads are often fleeting and hidden from public view. Recent AI developments make it easier and cheaper to create false and misleading political ads in large volumes, with multiple variations increasingly difficult to detect.
This “dark advertising” creates information asymmetries, where groups have access to information and can control and shape how it’s delivered. That leaves voters exposed to tailored messages that may distort reality.
Targeted messaging makes it possible to selectively provide voters with very different views of the same candidate. In the recent U.S. presidential election, a political action committee linked to X owner Elon Musk targeted Arab-American voters with the message that Kamala Harris was a diehard Israel ally, while simultaneously messaging Jewish voters that she was an avid supporter of Palestine.
Ad targeting online also lets political advertisers single out groups more likely to be influenced by selective, misleading, or false information. Conservative lobby group Advance Australia’s recent campaign basically followed this playbook, disseminating outdated news articles on Facebook, a tactic known as malinformation, where factual information is deliberately spread misleadingly to harm individuals or groups.
The transparency tools provided by Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram, and Google parent company Alphabet — which include ad libraries and “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?” explanations — also fall woefully short of enabling meaningful oversight. These tools reveal little about the algorithms that determine ad delivery or the audiences being targeted. They do include some demographic breakdowns, but say little about the combination of ads an individual user might have seen and in what context.
Recent findings from the United States highlight the vulnerabilities of political advertising in the digital age. An investigation by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism revealed that deceptive political ads thrived on platforms like Facebook and Instagram in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. elections. Ads frequently employed AI-generated content, including fabricated audio of political figures, to mislead users and harvest personal information. One ad account network has run about 100,000 misleading ads, significantly exploiting Meta’s advertising systems.
The U.S. developments are alarming, but it’s important to recognize Australia’s unique political and regulatory landscape. Fundamental differences in media consumption, political structure, and culture and regulatory frameworks mean that Australia may not necessarily follow the same trajectory as the United States.
The AEC does enforce specific rules on political advertising, particularly during official campaign periods, yet oversight is weak outside these periods, meaning misleading content can circulate unchecked. The media blackout period bans political ads on radio and TV three days before the federal election, but it does not apply to online advertising, meaning there is little time to identify or challenge misleading ads.
The failure to pass truth-in-political-advertising laws only exacerbates the problem. The Albanese government recently withdrew a proposed truth-in-political-advertising bill, leaving voters vulnerable to misleading content that undermines democratic integrity. The bill was never introduced to Parliament and its future remains uncertain.
Ad-driven technology firms like Meta and Alphabet have backed away from previous initiatives to curb misinformation and deceptive advertising and enforce minimum standards. Despite Meta’s public commitments to prevent misinformation from spreading, deceptive ads still flourished throughout the 2024 U.S. election, raising significant concerns about the effectiveness of platform self-regulation while backtracking on fact-checking raises concerns about Meta’s overall commitment to combating misinformation.
Given these developments, it is unrealistic to expect platforms to proactively police content effectively, especially in a jurisdiction like Australia.
Independent computational tools have emerged in an attempt to address these issues. They include browser plugins and mobile apps that allow users to donate their ad data. During the 2022 election, the ADM+S Australian Ad Observatory project collected hundreds of thousands of advertisements, uncovering instances of undisclosed political ads.
In the lead-up to the 2025 election, that project will rely on a new mobile advertising toolkit capable of detecting mobile digital political advertising served on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Regulatory solutions like the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) offer another potential path forward, mandating access to political advertising data for researchers and policymakers. Australia lags in adopting similar measures.
Without some of these solutions, platforms remain free to follow their economic incentive to pump the most sensational, controversial, and attention-getting content into people’s news feeds, regardless of accuracy. This creates a fertile environment for misleading ads, not least because platforms have been given protection from liability. That is not an information system compatible with democracy.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info.
