
If there is an autumn election, voters will be bombarded by a wave of unregulated ‘news’
On the day Boris Johnson took over as prime minister, hundreds of Facebook ads dropped like confetti into thousands of UK voters’ news feeds. Many were virtually identical, featuring a black-and-white photograph of Johnson gazing towards an unseen audience. “These are my priorities,” one version of the ad read. “What are yours?”
Quickly, the ads were interpreted as the start of Johnson’s election campaign and the splurge drew immediate parallels with the Facebook-driven 2016 Vote Leave campaign, especially since the director of that campaign – the Svengali-like Dominic Cummings – walked into 10 Downing Street as Johnson’s most senior adviser on the same day. Then on Friday we learned, through reports in the Guardian, that the political campaigning firm CTF Partners, one of whose heads ran Johnson’s leadership campaign, was running a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook on behalf of its clients.

You must be logged in to post a comment.