Political Ads on Linkedin During the 2024 Municipal Elections: The Declared Ban and the Reality in Practice

On February 27, 2024, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) published Resolution No. 23,732/2024, requiring digital platforms which provide political and electoral advertising services in Brazil to offer an accessible, user-friendly online repository to archive and make data on political content publicly available. Following the resolution, companies such as Google and Kwai claimed it was technically impossible to implement the required measures, despite having robust technological systems, and subsequently placed a ban on political ads. However, studies by NetLab UFRJ showed that the ban was insufficient to prevent the placement of political ads on Google's platforms.

In this study, we assessed whether LinkedIn complies with legal standards and its own guidelines on the placement of political advertising. The platform provides a public repository with all ads served in the last year, accessible both via an Application Programming Interface (API) and a web interface. However, their advertising policies prohibit the placement of political ads. Based on data from the platform's repository, we conducted a case study on political-electoral ads identified during the pre-campaign and first-round campaign of the 2024 municipal elections.

In this report, we first contextualize Resolution No. 23,732/2024 and examine LinkedIn's advertising policies, detailing the ad review process described in its official documentation, the types of prohibited and restricted content, and their moderation and advertiser verification policies. We then present the results of the analysis of ads that mentioned election- and political- terms. We analyzed data collected from the API on 273 ads that were running on LinkedIn between May 1st and October 7th, 2024.

The results showed that, based on the TSE definition, 31.9% of the ads analyzed (87) promoted political-electoral content, with clear references to individuals holding elected office, bills, and/or public policies. In addition, 14.7% (40) also mentioned public officials and notable players in the Brazilian political field whose posts are nominated, not elected, such as ministers, as well as mentions of public policies.

As with Google, our findings demonstrate that LinkedIn's declared ban on political-electoral ads does not prevent them from actually being placed. This situation highlights the complexity involved in classifying ads as political, especially when this it defines the very application of transparency measures, a common practice in digital platform advertising repositories. Although LinkedIn effectively allows the circulation of political and electoral content, it does not meet the transparency requirements set in Resolution No. 23,732/2024.

We argue that effective scrutiny of online advertising depends on the broad application of transparency measures, regardless of the classification assigned to ads. Systematic analysis of all types of ads on digital platforms is essential for supporting the ongoing review of the definition of political advertising adopted by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and future legislative initiatives on the topic.

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Anúncios políticos no Linkedin durante as Eleições Municipais de 2024.pdf

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DATA ACESS

If you would like to access the database for this report, please send an email to netlab@eco.ufrj.br identifying yourself, explaining why you are interested in the data and how it will be used. NetLab will evaluate your request and get in touch.

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WARNING

This report is an independent production of NetLab UFRJ. All decisions regarding this work were made exclusively by the researchers of the laboratory. The funders of NetLab UFRJ have no influence on the laboratory's research agenda and did not participate in any stage of the production of this report.

Information on NetLab UFRJ's funding sources is available here.