We believe that the open and honest debate of issues facing the UK is fundamental to the functioning of our democracy.
In recent years, the rules designed to safeguard against the spread of disinformation and promote healthy political debate haven’t kept up with the pace of new communication technologies.
Our politics is suffering because of a refusal to reform political advertising.
We aren’t anti-advertising, in fact we are quite the opposite. Our organisation was set up by practitioners in the industry passionate about responsible advertising.
Our non-partisan coalition is calling on the UK Parliament to implement a four-point plan to improve the transparency and accuracy of discourse around our elections by reforming political advertising in the following ways:
- Legislate so that all paid-for political adverts can be viewed by the public
- Give an existing body the power to regulate political advertising content or create a new one to do so
- Require all objective factual claims used in political adverts to be substantiated
- Compulsory imprints or watermarks to show the origin of online adverts
You can read more about the aims and background to our campaign here.
We are tracking misleading claims in political ads over the 2019 UK general election that you can view here. If you’ve got any that you’d like to submit to us for review please email examples@reformpoliticaladvertising.org.
Legislation can take some time to be implemented. To practically help political advertisers play their part in accelerating political ad reform for the UK general election we’ve launched a campaign pledge that can be adopted to help them advertise in a more transparent and accurate manner.
We also recently developed an international framework and campaign pledge for political advertising reform to share learnings from our UK campaign which you can read at the above links.
