Are the major digital platforms' advertising transparency tools really... transparent? No, says the Mozilla Foundation, maker of the Firefox browser, and Check First, a company specializing in tools for combating disinformation, in a joint report published on Tuesday, April 16.
The two organizations scrutinized the "ads libraries" offered by the 11 major platforms on which European legislation imposes specific transparency obligations, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, AliExpress and Zalando (Amazon is temporarily exempt). These tools are meant to enable regular citizens, as well as journalists and law enforcement agencies, to examine the nature of the advertising they see on the platforms, in particular to make sure it does not contain illegal or misleading content.
In practice, however, the ads libraries deployed by these major companies lack functionality, if they are not virtually unusable. The report is particularly critical of the tools deployed by AliExpress, Zalando, Bing (Microsoft), Snapchat and X: The search engine implemented by Bing does not accept accented characters; Snapchat offers a rather complete and reliable advertising library, but does not allow keyword searches; and X's transparency tool has so many restrictions on its use that it is almost impossible to use.
By comparison, Apple, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok are doing better. But problems remain, as Mozilla and Check First note. Facebook and Instagram's ad transparency tool is one of the most convenient to use and one of the most comprehensive, but the two organizations found notable errors in ad indexing. TikTok's system suffers from similar errors. The report is harsher on Alphabet (the Google search engine and YouTube), whose tool "has progressed, but six years after its introduction, it is still not possible to search by keywords." This, too, makes it virtually unusable.
In several cases, Mozilla and Check First believe that major platforms have "taken one step forward, two steps back." These include X, which has largely gone backward on the data made available since its takeover by Elon Musk. "This is perhaps why the European Commission has included X's advertising library in the points raised by its formal procedure against the platform," write the report's authors.
In addition, there is a specific problem linked to "sponsored content": videos or messages published in the form of regular content, but for a fee. The practice is common, but it makes it more difficult to track than traditional advertising inserts, partly because it relies on the goodwill of the influencers publishing this type of content. In France, they are obligated to label such content, but the rule is not always followed. The report also points to the responsibility of the major platforms: "Only a handful [of the platforms] analyzed have a repository for sponsored or influencer content, even though many of them allow influencer content on their services," summarizes Mozilla.