Half of the world’s largest digital platforms fail to meet minimum standards of transparency regarding the advertising they carry. This is one of the main findings of the study Data Not Found carried out by our research group at NetLab – the Internet and Social Media Research Laboratory at the School of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – in collaboration with researchers from the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy (MCTD), an independent team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
The study investigated, in an unprecedented and transnational manner, the availability and quality of data on user-generated content and advertising across 15 major digital platforms operating in Brazil, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom. The analysis includes some of the main social media platforms in use, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Kwai and Telegram, allowing for a comparison of how these companies provide information within different regulatory contexts.
These regions were selected for specific reasons. The European Union stands out for having the most advanced platform regulation efforts in the world, having consolidated laws such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), whose transparency standards frequently serve as a benchmark for international debate. The United Kingdom does not adopt universal transparency rules, opting instead for a model in which the supervision of platforms is determined through case-by-case assessments by regulatory authorities.
