Political researchers have raised concerns their work would be affected due to Meta and Google's decision to cease their official political ad services and adjust their ad archives – a move responding to the EU's new advertising regulations.
With the EU's new regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertisements (TTPA), and its enforcement on 10 October, US tech giants Meta and Google decided to stop serving political ads in member states due to what they believed were unattainable added complexities and legal liabilities.
But political observers had relied on ads on Meta and Google's ad platforms for their analysis, studying both who bought ads and what political narrative each ad pushed.
For example, studies analysing digital political advertising have found populist actors exploited digital platforms to circumvent traditional media.
The changes also affected researchers such as Trisha Meyer, who authored a 2025 report for the European Digital Media Observatory on political-ad transparency, compliance, and targeting on Meta and Google's platforms during the last European election.
She argued that political advertising will just become less visible. "I don't think it's going to take place less," she told EUobserver.
Instead, Meyer thinks ads will move to users' feeds, such as direct posts from political parties' accounts or influencer marketing.
"We've now just moved that into a space that is harder to research," she said, explaining that the change "shifted the blind spot," because there was less access to data for researchers.
Meyer sees political ads as crucial for understanding the state of democracy in Europe, highlighting an insight from her report that further substantiates claims that far-right parties went on spending sprees in the last election in 2024.
Her research found the far-right Belgian Vlaams Belang spent €429,000 in the run-up to the European election in May, and Hungary's Fidesz comprised 71.5 percent of the country's online ad spending.
She believes such insights are now much more difficult to calculate due to changes in the platforms and archives — a sentiment that's shared by transparency researchers across the board.
"We're not going to find it easy to adapt. It really did change the tone of the type of work that we would be trying to do in the EU," Sam Jeffers, executive director and co-founder of Who Targets Me, a political advertising transparency non-profit, told EUobserver.
The non-profit used this data to create a resource for real-time political ad accountability intended for researchers and journalists.
Who Targets Me relied on the ad transparency data, which Meta opened to the public in 2018, and Google in 2023, containing historical ads.
Launching these tools after calls for transparency when the 2016 US election of president Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum demonstrated the political power of targeted online advertising.
To respond to this power, the EU decided to concretise its TTPA rules, hoping to improve the practice of online political advertising – rules that caused that Meta and Google to change their services
Now, in Google's Ads Transparency Centre, when searching for political ads in the member states, it goes to a page listing supported regions with political ads, which excludes the EU.
And in Meta's Ad Library, you can still find archived-ad metadata, which includes info on who purchased ads, how much they spent, and how many ads they bought, but the "issues, elections, or politics" category no longer appears for searches about EU nations, and you cannot see the ads themselves.
The pulling of political ads online comes at an inopportune time for researchers, as political parties and organisations rapidly shift their campaigns online.
According to a 2024 AdLens report, political advertising in Belgium on Google and Meta rose to €15m in 2024.
"Digital campaigning is a huge part of the modern reality of trying to win elections. And, I think we were trying to help the discipline of that to improve," said Jeffers.
Jeffers explains how the work is now "harder for us in a world where actually the majority of what's going to be needed now is more investigatory work."
Meta saw their position as an unintended consequence of the significant obligations added by the new regulation, but confirmed that they were not removing access to archived ads from their libraries.
In a statement to EUobserver, a commission spokesperson explained that they were aware of the impact the new regulations have and will continue to discuss this topic.
The commission believes the regulation will still help with political-ad transparency and emphasised it "does not ban political advertising," the spokesperson said.
"We are also in contact with stakeholders and member states to assess the possible impact of Meta's commercial decision," they said.
To support compliance, the European Commission released practical guidelines on 8 October, two days before enforcement.
Google did not respond in time for publication.
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