By 8am on Monday, the "Jim Gavin for President" social media accounts had been deleted.
Other parts of his campaign will take weeks to work their way through the system; posters taken down, bus shelter ads replaced and political fall-out settled. But search TikTok for Jim Gavin’s account, and you’ll find this and the more than 70 videos he had posted are already gone.
Meta’s ad library, which on Sunday showed that Gavin had 83 ads running live, now claims that “Jim Gavin for President did not run any ads about social issues, elections or politics during the last 7 days”.
On the internet, political artefacts can be erased with the click of a button. And we are facing a nuclear-level wipe-out of our political history as the main providers of digital political ads press delete on seven years of their digital ad archive this week.
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Seven years ago, we had another bombshell political announcement in the closing weeks before a vote, when Facebook and Google pulled political ads from the Irish market right before the referendum on the Eighth Amendment.
The companies reacted hastily as international media reported on foreign actors paying for ads on their platforms. That ban only lasted a short while and both companies soon introduced new transparency and identity verification tools that have been operational since 2018. This built archives on the company websites that stored this valuable data on what was said and what was spent, allowing us to analyse the two general elections, two local and European elections, various referendums and two presidential campaigns that have taken place since.
Now, Meta plans to stop allowing political ads once again from this Friday. Google already banned them on September 22nd, and when it did so, it deleted this seven-year archive of Irish political history.
These new bans are in response to EU rules on political ads about to come into force. The regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Ads (TTPA) was designed to prevent manipulation and interference in elections in Europe.
It requires platforms to label political ads, restrict targeting and keep usable and mergeable repositories for several years. Rather than comply, Meta and Google have tweaked their terms of service to say that political ads are now simply not allowed.
Yet, history shows us that it is exceedingly difficult for tech platforms to successfully stop selling ads intended to sway public opinion. In the closing days of the Eighth Amendment campaign, political ads were still running in Ireland through the platforms that so dramatically banned them.
The Guardian website, for example, was covered in campaign ads served by Google. The Guardian had opted out of political ads in its agreement with Google, in addition to the Irish ban. But someone was able to evade Google’s automated systems that try to weed out rule-breaking ads. We never found out who, or how much was spent, or where that money came from.
This wasn’t just a teething issue. TikTok today bans political ads, but last year I found several running on the platform in advance of the 2024 local elections.
Romania then had to cancel and re-run its presidential election when officials found so much clandestine paid political content on TikTok that the result could not be considered valid.
There are signs that the current Google political ad ban may not be comprehensive either. Researchers in Hungary last week found that the company was running ads for Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party after the ban was introduced. The party used its own branding and accounts and was able to get through the ad-filtering system by re-classifying the ads as regular commercials, according to Hungarian news outlet Telex.
Back in 2018, the official Eighth Amendment referendum campaigns reacted angrily to the unanticipated ban seven years ago, as it undid carefully laid plans.
This time, campaigns have had more time to prepare, but they will nevertheless find it harder to engage voters in an already short campaign. The 2025 internet is even more algorithm-driven than in 2018, meaning candidates will now have to figure out how to ride the wave of online trends if they are to have any chance of reaching voters.
During the referendum on the Eighth Amendment I had been calling out the problems with online political ads, but like the campaign groups, I did not welcome the ban.
We had built a very low budget and scrappy set of tools to scrape ads being shown in Ireland from people’s feeds, and were able to find US, UK and untraceable groups targeting Irish voters, discoveries that led to the companies taking action.
We had been calling for transparency and for the ability to understand what campaigners were doing in an opaque area of election activity. We wanted the platforms to put in place robust transparency tools, and measures to prevent bad actors from using their products.
The 2018 ban achieved none of these aims. It did spur the creation of company-initiated digital archives of political ads. At the time it felt like a win, now it seems it was a hollow victory.
The dedicated political ad archives are being shut down, meaning we will lose this valuable real-time insight into Irish political campaigns, as well as that crucial archive of our political past. There is still time for Google to reverse this decision, which they should, and Meta should avoid erasing its archive this week.
Either way, Irish political parties, candidates and election watchers have had another sobering lesson on the danger of relying on privatised technology for our democratic architecture. The irony is that this is exactly what the TTPA was meant to prevent.
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at thebriefing.ie
