"No" Ned said with sadness in his voice. "Now it ends.'

🎯 @favstats.eu about Meta / Google's EU political advertising ban: "the self-imposed political ad ban is a complete failure of platform responsibility that will make our elections less transparent, less fair, and more vulnerable to the whims of algorithms" www.techpolicy.press/what-data-re...

Thank you @techpolicypress.bsky.social and @ramshajahangir.bsky.social for giving me the space to rant about the “end” of political advertising on social media in the EU!

I took an Uber with another furry from the con to the airport and I exited there, while he stayed for another stop. The driver made him pay additional 150€ to the 70€ Uber trip to exit the car and Uber is not understanding the issue here.

"The week that AI hit Europe’s elections" With insights from @claesdevreese.bsky.social, @favstats.eu & yours truly! Thanks to @pieterhaeck.bsky.social & @evahartog.bsky.social.

“In a study of some 20,000 election-related posts in the Netherlands, researchers [..] found that over 400 posts were AI-generated. The party of far-right leader Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom (PVV), came out on top in its use of AI.” www.politico.eu/article/elec...

From far-right AI imagery to AI chatbots offering vote advice. Weighing in in @politico.eu on the role of AI in the Dutch elections with great colleagues @favstats.eu and @hannescools.bsky.social www.politico.eu/article/elec...

Thanks for having us, it was the perfect way to spend the election night!

Excitement, tension, bingo and great insights from my fellow PolComm colleagues - think that describes our election event in CREA quite well. Great way to count down to the exitpolls! @markboukes.bsky.social @favstats.eu @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social @lindabomm.bsky.social @corinnaoschatz.bsky.social

Today is the day 🎁 The #dsa regime for researchers to get access to platform data to study societal impact and risks starts TODAY. This has been a loooooong time coming. And the proof of the pudding will be in the eating … #dataaccess #commsky digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/new-...

I have always exaggerated with dashboards, but this 🇳🇱 Dutch election campaign I did not make 1, I did not make 2, but I made 3 dashboards 😅 1. tracking the use of AI (campaigntracker.nl/en) 2. tracking campaign spending (lnkd.in/eUKgeV9V) 3. tracking targeting on Meta (lnkd.in/eXrp454E) #tk2025

584 AI posts tijdens de Nederlandse verkiezingscampagne, met 60% van verrechts, en met name op Facebook.

🚨 CampAIgn Tracker Update: we now identify 584 AI posts found in our campaign monitoring. 60% from far-right accounts, mainly PVV MPs' "Geen Aangifte" page (now, ironically, facing charges). We find: AI was more succesful on Facebook but flopped elsewhere. #tk2025 🇬🇧: campaigntracker.nl/en

Check out Campaign Tracker NL, looking at the use of AI in the Dutch election campaign (and here are some particularly egregious examples from Geert Wilders' PVV and aligned pages) www.campaigntracker.nl/explore/

As a scholar I rarely offer electoral guidance. But today I do: DO NOT USE AI CHATBOTS AS YOUR VOTE ADVICE APPLICATION AHEAD OF (THE DUTCH) ELECTIONS Full of errors, bias and lack of transparency. @ernesto-deleon.com @favstats.eu @theoaraujo.bsky.social and🙋unpack why algosoc.org/results/1-in...

🤖 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐀𝐈𝐠𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 🇳🇱 Less than one week before the Dutch elections, @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social & I looked at over 20k posts to reveal patterns in the usage of AI-generated visuals across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. #tk2025 🧵Thread

Guess who is on national TV tonight

I think this Facebook page is a terrifying case study in how gen AI slop has enabled the creation of an automated hate machine, churning out endless caricatures of made-up enemies, immigrants and politicians, optimized for engagement. In many ways, it embodied the very nightmare many of us feared.

The Facebook page behind these images was the most active spreader of political AI content, posting multiple times a day and becoming the most engaged-with pages on Facebook among all those we track. Even surpassing Geert Wilders in total engagement during October. The page has now been deleted.

🇳🇱 Track political ad spending in the Netherlands! My new dashboard visualizes €9M+ in campaign spending for #TK2025. 👉 favstats.github.io/reclamer/ Powered by my -also new- {reclamer} #rstats package to retrieve ad spending on traditional media sources: github.com/favstats/rec...

Elections in the Netherlands On social media, no other top candidate even approaches the dominance of radical right PVV leader Geert Wilders. Even taking into account how much longer he's been around, it's an alarming chasm. (And if Baudet still headed the extremist FvD list, he'd easily be second)

🤖 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐀𝐈𝐠𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 🇳🇱 Less than one week before the Dutch elections, @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social & I looked at over 20k posts to reveal patterns in the usage of AI-generated visuals across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. #tk2025 🧵Thread

I was interviewed by @winfriedbaijens.bsky.social on @nieuws.nos.nl @nporadio1.bsky.social Met het Oog op Morgen, to talk about my research on voting behaviour of Muslims. It was such a pleasure to be there again!

Spoke to @bloomberg.com about how the decision to halt political advertising across the EU by Meta and Google is likely to reshape the campaign landscape, especially for the upcoming Dutch election. 🔗 Read the full Bloomberg article here (gift link): www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

As I have been writing slides with quarto and reveal.js I found myself writing similar styling code. I have finally gotten myself together and extracted some of those classes out into an Quarto extension. Heavily inspired by tailwindcss github.com/EmilHvitfeld...

Chatbots offer explicit vote advice ahead of elections. A simple prompt leads to receiving an advice for the Dutch October 29 elections ⬇️ The Dutch Data Protection Authority concluded: AI chatbots are not transparent, they are not auditable, and providers should prevent use as vote advice.

Met link naar rapport www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/actueel/ap-w...

It's probably supposed to be AI-generated Pim Fortuyn but looks like Jeff Bezos to me.

A few notes on recent UK political ad spending: - Tory spend is high post-conference (i.e. over the last week), but lower than through the late summer - Reform spending has dropped off after a busy summer - Labour has YouTube to itself - Labour spends nearly 2x more than others

💡 Hoe kijken politieke partijen aan tegen onderzoek, onderwijs en internationalisering? In aanloop naar de TK verkiezingen van 2025 analyseerden we met De Jonge Akademie de verkiezingsprogramma’s van alle deelnemende partijen. 👉 Bekijk het Dashboard hier: dejongeakademie.nl/publicaties/...

If you ever wanted to delve into the AI-generated world of far-right imagination.. now you can. See our CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱 here: www.campaigntracker.nl/en/ #tk2025

🚀 And this marks our launch of the CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱! @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social and I are glad to finally publish our dashboard where we monitor the use of AI imagery in campaign messages, by parties, politicians & other actors during the election #tk2025 See here www.campaigntracker.nl/en/

The use of AI generated content in political messaging has become a feature in today’s communication ecosystem. How often is it used in the 🇳🇱 election campaign, and by whom? Check out colleague @favstats.eu and @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social’s AI campaign tracker #tk2025 www.campaigntracker.nl/en/

If you ever wanted to delve into the AI-generated world of far-right imagination.. now you can. See our CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱 here: www.campaigntracker.nl/en/ #tk2025

🚀 And this marks our launch of the CampAIgn Tracker 🇳🇱! @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social and I are glad to finally publish our dashboard where we monitor the use of AI imagery in campaign messages, by parties, politicians & other actors during the election #tk2025 See here www.campaigntracker.nl/en/

Our CampAIgn Tracker got featured in this brilliant piece of investigative journalism by @groene.nl. They reveal the prompts behind an extremely disturbing AI-powered campaign by Dutch politicians that we find is one of the top producers & spreaders of AI-generated content in this election #tk2025.

Front page of @lechobe.bsky.social today: one of the last live looks at political ad spending in Europe, powered by metatargetr. With Meta’s upcoming ban, paid political ads in the digital sphere will vanish from view.. but it will not spell the end of paid political influence. lnkd.in/ephiha3S

Some fresh hell: a TikTok account that just posts AI videos of sinking ships full of people.

In Moldova, in the week to the 25th Sept (the latest we have data for), the pro-EU PAS party and civil society organisations together bought nearly 50% of political advertising on Meta. The pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc bought just under 2% of the total.

Absolutely shameful. There was zero reason for Google to remove historical data. They could have just kept a copy running. Now many tools I've built alongside @whotargets.me for more election transparency in the EU are effectively defunct. Overall, a great loss for researchers and the public.

On what the American takeover of US TikTok could mean for online political ads: whotargets.me/en/does-us-o...

Ten years ago, I took part in NMUN. After visiting the General Assembly Hall, I uploaded this image with the caption: “We either learn to swim together or we drown separately.” Today, I mourn that we seem to be on the exact opposite trajectory from what I had hoped for.

Despite the fact that Meta is poised to ban political ads on their platforms by October 10th, Dutch parties are ramping up spending, about 160k Euro in past 30 days 🇳🇱 As always I will be tracking targeting (w/ @whotargets.me) as long as ads run. Ex.: D66 is heavily trying to reach younger people!

Great to see this out! With @bsky.charispapaevangelou.eu we analyse the DSA “Statement of Reasons” database, the EU-mandated archive of moderation decisions by online platforms. We examine what kind of platform observability the database affords & find large regional and cross-platform differences.

[New paper] Trading nuance for scale? Platform observability and content governance under the DSA, By @bsky.charispapaevangelou.eu & @favstats.eu policyreview.info/articles/ana... #DSA

Is this the first time ever that Donald Trump publicly labeled something that he attempted to do was a failure?

Ben Guerin, whose agency has contributed to multiple winning election campaigns in the UK and beyond, on why the EU's political ad regulation seems to be turning into an own goal.

Haven't done one in a while so here we go: as voters head to the polls, here’s how some 🇳🇴 Norwegian parties spent their Meta ad budgets. Check out more in the the dashboard (in collab with @whotargets.me): favstats.github.io/no25/

Haven't done one in a while so here we go: as voters head to the polls, here’s how some 🇳🇴 Norwegian parties spent their Meta ad budgets. Check out more in the the dashboard (in collab with @whotargets.me): favstats.github.io/no25/

Stay tuned for the Dutch version of the CampAIgntracker! 🇳🇱 Together with @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social we will be documenting the AI posts that circulate during the upcoming Dutch snap elections on October 29th. Here a sneak peek of images that we found.