How the EU Is Increasing Transparency in Political Advertising

A look at Regulation (EU) 2024/900 and what it means for political ads online

You’re scrolling through Instagram the week before an election. A sponsored post appears, backing a candidate you’ve barely heard of. It’s polished, persuasive, and gone the moment you swipe past.

Who paid for it? Why did you see it, and not your neighbour? Is everyone even seeing the same message?

Until recently, there was often no reliable way to know. That lack of transparency is exactly what the EU’s new rules aim to address. Since October 2025, EU law has required greater transparency about who sponsors political advertising and how it is targeted.

The problem: an ad campaign you can’t see

Political advertising online doesn’t work like a poster on a wall. A single campaign can be split into dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different versions, each shown only to a specific slice of the population: students, pensioners, people who’ve searched for information on immigration, undecided voters, environmental activists.

This is called microtargeting, and it relies on personal data, sometimes very sensitive data, to decide exactly who sees what. Nobody outside the campaign gets to see the full picture — you might never know that the ad in front of you was one of twenty different, even contradictory, messages the same party was running that week. Public debate becomes something different people are, in effect, no longer having together.

Why the EU acted

The rapid growth of online political advertising made it increasingly difficult to identify who was financing campaigns or how voters were being targeted. EU lawmakers also highlighted concerns about disinformation, foreign interference and the use of personal data during election campaigns.

These concerns have not remained theoretical. In December 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential elections after intelligence findings pointed to a coordinated online influence campaign involving undisclosed paid promotion on TikTok.

In response, the EU adopted Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising in March 2024 and has applied across all Member States since October 2025. It doesn’t police what political messages say. Its aim is to make it easier for citizens to answer three questions: who is speaking to me, why am I hearing it, and how did they get my data.

What actually changes

Political advertisements covered by the regulation must be clearly identified as such. Publishers must label them, name the sponsor, and state whether personal data was used for targeting — either directly on the ad or through a linked “transparency notice.”

The transparency notice is the core of the new system. It identifies the sponsor behind the advertisement, explains whether personal data was used for targeting, indicates which election or policy debate the ad relates to, and tells users how they can report the advertisement or exercise their data-protection rights. Publishers must keep this information available for seven years. To make this information easier to access, the regulation also provides for a European repository of online political advertisements, which the European Commission is responsible for establishing.

Microtargeting itself is heavily restricted. The regulation prohibits using targeting and ad-delivery techniques based on special categories of personal data — political opinions, religion, ethnicity, health, sexual orientation — whether stated directly or inferred from browsing behaviour. Any other personal data can only be used for targeting with separate, explicit consent given specifically for political advertising, and in line with EU data-protection rules and recent Court of Justice case law, users should be able to refuse this without losing access to the service. The regulation also prohibits targeting people known with reasonable certainty to be below the voting age established under national law.

Foreign funding faces new limits, too. In the three months before an election or referendum, political advertising services can only be sold to EU citizens, to third-country nationals with voting rights, or to EU-established companies not controlled from outside the bloc. The aim is to reduce the risk of foreign actors influencing election campaigns through paid political advertising, not to ban non-EU voices from political debate generally.

Non-compliance isn’t a minor risk: the regulation allows national authorities to impose significant penalties, including fines that can reach up to 6% of annual turnover for certain serious or repeated infringements.

Why it matters

The regulation doesn’t tell anyone what to think or how to vote, and it deliberately leaves the content of political messages untouched — that’s still protected as free political speech. It’s designed to make it easier for citizens to identify who sponsored a political ad, understand whether targeting techniques were used, and obtain information about the data involved. Greater transparency also makes it easier for journalists, researchers and election observers to scrutinise political campaigns and compare the messages different groups receive.

The regulation also arrives at a time when generative AI is making it easier and cheaper to produce personalised political content at scale. While Regulation 2024/900 does not regulate AI itself, its transparency requirements may become increasingly important if AI-generated political advertising becomes more widespread.

Next time a political ad shows up in your feed, look for the label. It’s a small piece of text, but it represents a fairly significant bet: that European democracy works better when voters can see the machinery behind the message, not just the message itself. Whether these rules succeed will depend not only on platforms and regulators, but also on whether citizens make use of the information now available to them.

Bibliography:

European Parliament & Council of the European Union. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/900 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 March 2024 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising. Official Journal of the European Union. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/900/oj/eng

Le Monde. (2024, December 7). Romania’s presidential election canceled over TikTok disinformation investigation. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/12/07/romania-s-presidential-election-canceled-over-tiktok-disinformation-investigation_6735508_4.html?srsltid=AfmBOoovhiCzs96cqEjQF15ou0d9aevPiFsPllIq_IbbIGBH_O_Pnp4X

European Commission. (2020). Reinforcing democracy: Political advertising. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/attachment/870434/Reinforcing Democracy _political_advertising.pdf

European Commission. (n.d.). Transparency and targeting of political advertising. European Commission. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/democracy-eu-citizenship-anti-corruption/democracy-and-electoral-rights/transparency-and-targeting-political-advertising_en