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A shadowy battle is being fought in the Facebook feeds of UK voters. Political parties are using the online giant鈥檚 wealth of data on its users to send precisely targeted adverts that they hope will swing next week鈥檚 general election. But there is little clarity about what the ads are saying.

These 鈥渄ark adverts鈥� allow political parties to tailor a message to appear only in the newsfeeds of specific audiences, leaving non-targeted people unaware. These adverts don鈥檛 appear publicly anywhere, which is raising concerns about their content.

鈥淚t鈥檚 fundamental to a healthy democracy that claims and promises made by candidates and parties before an election should be open to scrutiny and challenge. Dark ads made over closed social media platforms are not,鈥� says , director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King鈥檚 College London.

There is no indication that parties are using these ads to mislead voters, but without seeing what鈥檚 in them, it is impossible to know. During the Brexit vote last year, the Vote Leave campaign was criticised for its inaccurate claim that the UK sends 拢350 million to the European Union every week, but this claim was written on the side of a bus for all to see. What goes on in personalised newsfeeds is another matter entirely.

Targeting the targeters

A small group of online vigilantes aims to find out what鈥檚 in the messages. is a browser extension that extracts and analyses every political advert that 6000 volunteers stumble across in their Facebook feeds.

鈥淲e鈥檝e tracked over 1100 versions of the same message from the Liberal Democrats alone,鈥� says the co-founder of the project, Louis Knight-Webb. Some adverts targeted Facebook users more likely to be concerned by funding cuts to the military, while other people saw a similar advert about grammar schools.

Knight-Webb thinks there should be a public repository of these adverts so anyone can vet politicians鈥� claims. It is also important that voters can poke their heads out of their own filter bubbles and see what messages other people are being exposed to, he says.

Another way to shine a light on these messages would be to require parties to give more detail about their spending on social media campaigns. The Electoral Commission, which governs campaign spending, that UK parties spent 拢1.3 million on Facebook advertising during the 2015 election campaign, 拢1.2 million of which came from the Conservative party. But this doesn鈥檛 tell us how that money was used.

Increasing transparency

鈥淥ne of the ironies of this whole problem is that aspects of digital campaigning could be extremely transparent,鈥� says Moore. Parties know who they are targeting and how much they paid to place those adverts. Spending could be easily broken down by demographic and constituency, giving us an insight into how and where parties are targeting voters. 鈥淚nstead we have invoices that are effectively anonymised,鈥� he says.

And although Electoral Commission rules regulate the money that parties are allowed to spend during campaigns, social media advertising is blurring the lines between different types of spending. If a party spends money on profiling audiences and then saves that data to target adverts during a campaign a year later, does that count as campaign spending? Or, if a national Facebook advert campaign is targeted at people who are more likely to live in one area, should that count as local spending or national?

The Electoral Commission is concerned with who the parties give money to, not what that money is used for, says its spokesperson. It also doesn鈥檛 vet the accuracy of political adverts, although the Information Commissioner鈥檚 Office, the UK body that protects data rights, has already launched a formal investigation into the targeting of voters through social media.

To ensure there is clarity over the use of dark adverts, the UK鈥檚 electoral laws will need to be updated for the social media age. And that can happen only if the parties using the ads are willing to vote on new legislation. Until then, the electorate remains in the dark.