Today, MANS called on all political parties participating in the election process to conduct a campaign on social media in a transparent manner, which will obviously be one of the key ways of communication with citizens during coronavirus epidemic. It is expected that for this reason political parties will allocate significant funds for paid advertising on Facebook, YouTube and other social media.
An analysis conducted by MANS regarding political ads of those participants in the election process who have already started the campaign shows that some political parties promote their election programme through social websites that are not registered for political advertising.
Thus, the campaign of the Social Democrats of Montenegro is placed through the Facebook page “Mi odlučujemo“ (“We decide”) which is registered as a Fun Page, while the municipal committees of DPS for Podgorica, Gusinje and Petnjica do it through pages registered as “communities” and “news and media”. Other political parties have already registered their Facebook pages as their official pages where political content is placed.
In addition, last year, Facebook adopted new rules for political advertising, according to which all authors of political ads must identify themselves, i.e. publicly state information about who is responsible for political ads, and who finances them.
As of today, those rules apply to Montenegro as well, thus, all paid political ads that are published on Facebook and Instagram must contain information on who paid for that ad and who is responsible for it.
When it comes to current online campaign of the parties participating in this year’s elections, only some of the parties have already started publishing this data on their own, while for others there is no information on who is responsible for their posting and how they are financed.
As of today, DPS started publishing that information on its main Facebook page, while all Facebook ads of that party published so far for this year’s campaign were without that information. Democratic Montenegro have already been announcing how their ads are financed, but some of them that are placed through the specialized page “Braća smo – Mir je naša nacija“ (“We are brothers – Peace is our nation”), did not contain the mentioned information. Data on the source of funding are also not included in the ads of SD, SDP and the pages of Draginja Vuksanović Stanković, DEMOS, the Bosniak Party, and the new party of Snežana Jonica – Socialists of Montenegro. The other parties we analysed either did not have paid ads or posted this information in advance.
The obligation to identify the author and publicly announce the source of funding is not limited to the official Facebook pages of political parties, but also to all other pages that promote a particular party or candidate in the form of a paid advertisement, or run election-informing campaigns.
Advertising in accordance with the new rules of the Facebook company will enable the citizens of Montenegro to have full information about the authors, sources of funding and their spending during the election campaign, which has not been the case so far.
Let us remind that even in countries with much better legislation and the rule of law manipulations through social networks had a decisive influence on the elections, and that is why MANS once again calls on all actors in this year’s elections to run a transparent and fair campaign.
MANS
