Daniel Angus and Mark Andrejevic
Australia, March 2, 2025
The rise of Dark Advertising – personalised advertisements increasingly powered by artificial intelligence that evades public scrutiny – means that Australians face a murky information landscape going into the Federal Election.
It is already happening and, combined with Australia’s failure to enact truth-in-advertising legislation and big tech’s backtracking on fact-checking, means that voters are left vulnerable to ad-powered misinformation campaigns.
That is not good for democracy.
Tackling misinformation requires legislative action, international collaboration and continued pressure on platforms to open their systems to scrutiny.
The failures of US tech platforms during their own elections should serve as a clear warning to Australia that industry self-regulation is not an option.
Political advertising plays a pivotal role in shaping elections, even while it is shrouded in opacity and increasing misinformation.
In the lead-up to the 2025 Federal Election, a significant volume of deceptive advertising and digital content has already surfaced. That is not surprising, given the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) limits its oversight to the official campaign period, meaning false claims can proliferate freely before the official campaign.
At the heart of this challenge lies the evolution of digital political advertising.
What is Dark Advertising?
Modern campaigns rely heavily on social media platforms, leveraging associative ad models that tap into beliefs or interests to deliver digital advertising. Unlike traditional media, where advertisements are visible and subject to better regulatory and market scrutiny, digital advertisements are often fleeting and hidden from public view.
Recent AI developments make it easier and cheaper to create false and misleading political advertisements in large volumes with multiple variations increasingly difficult to detect.
This Dark Advertising creates information asymmetries, in this case, one where groups have access to information and can control and shape how it is delivered. That leaves voters exposed to tailored messages that may distort reality.
Targeted messaging makes it possible to selectively provide voters with very different views of the same candidate. In the recent US Presidential Election, a political action committee linked to X owner Elon Musk targeted Arab-American voters with the message that Kamala Harris was a diehard Israel ally, while simultaneously messaging Jewish voters that she was an avid supporter of Palestine.
Advertisements targeting online also let political advertisers single out groups more likely to be influenced by selective, misleading or false information.
Conservative lobby group Advance Australia’s recent campaign followed this playbook, disseminating outdated news articles on Facebook, a tactic known as mal-information, where factual information is deliberately spread misleadingly to harm individuals or groups.
The vulnerabilities
The Albanese government recently withdrew a proposed Truth-In-Political-Advertising-Bill, leaving voters vulnerable to misleading content that undermines democratic integrity.
The Bill was never introduced to Parliament and its future remains uncertain.
The transparency tools provided by Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram, and Google parent company Alphabet, which include advertisement libraries and “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?” explanations also fall woefully short of enabling meaningful oversight.
These tools reveal little about the algorithms that determine ad delivery or the audiences being targeted. They include some demographic breakdowns but say little about the combination of advertisements an individual user might have seen and in what context.
Recent findings from the US highlight the vulnerabilities of political advertising in the digital age.
An investigation by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism revealed that deceptive political advertisements thrived on platforms like Facebook and Instagram in the lead-up to the 2024 US elections.
Advertisements frequently employ AI-generated content, including fabricated audio of political figures to mislead users and harvest personal information. One advertisement account network has run about 100,000 misleading advertisements, significantly exploiting Meta’s advertising systems.
The Australian Story
The US developments are alarming, but it is important to recognise Australia’s unique political and regulatory landscape.
Australians have seen what happened in the US but fundamental differences in media consumption, political structure, culture and regulatory frameworks mean that Australia may not necessarily follow the same trajectory.
The AEC enforces specific rules on political advertising, particularly during official campaign periods, yet oversight is weak outside these periods, meaning misleading content can circulate unchecked. The failure to pass Truth-In-Political-Advertising Laws only exacerbates the problem.
The media blackout period bans political advertisements on Radio and TV three days before the Federal Election, but it does not apply to online advertising, meaning there is little time to identify or challenge misleading advertisements.
Ad-driven technology firms like Meta and Alphabet have backed away from previous initiatives to curb misinformation and deceptive advertising and enforce minimum standards.
Despite Meta’s public commitments to prevent misinformation from spreading, deceptive advertisements flourished throughout the 2024 US Election, raising significant concerns about the effectiveness of platform self-regulation while backtracking on fact-checking raises concerns about Meta’s overall commitment to combating misinformation.
Given these developments, it is unrealistic to expect platforms to proactively police content effectively, especially in a jurisdiction like Australia.
Some solutions
Independent computational tools have emerged in an attempt to address these issues.
They include browser plugins and mobile apps that allow users to donate their ad data. During the 2022 Election, the ADM+S Australian Ad Observatory project collected hundreds of thousands of advertisements, uncovering instances of undisclosed political advertisements.
In the lead-up to the 2025 Election, that project will rely on a new mobile advertising toolkit capable of detecting mobile digital political advertising served on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Regulatory solutions like the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) offer another potential path forward, mandating access to political advertising data for researchers and policymakers although Australia lags in adopting similar measures.
Without some of these solutions, platforms remain free to follow their economic incentive to pump the most sensational, controversial and attention-getting content into people’s news feeds, regardless of accuracy.
This creates a fertile environment for misleading advertisements, not least because platforms have been given protection from liability.
That is not an information system compatible with democracy.
Professor Daniel Angus is a leading expert in Computational Communication and Digital Media, specialising in the analysis of online discourse, AI, and Media Transparency. He is the Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. Professor Mark Andrejevic is an expert in the social and cultural implications of Data Mining, and Online Monitoring at Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism. He is also a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society. The above article, which appeared on the website of 360info, has been published here under Creative Commons.
