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Social Media: Advertising

Question for Department for Culture, Media and Sport

UIN HL3448, tabled on 20 March 2024

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that companies, such as Meta, appropriately regulate advertisements on their platforms to ensure compliance prior to publication; and whether they will consider imposing a ban on platforms that repeatedly fail to do so.

Answered on

3 April 2024

Online advertising in the UK is regulated independently by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which administers and enforces the advertising codes. While the codes apply to advertisers, the ASA works with major platforms including Meta through its Intermediary and Platform Principles pilot to help uphold the UK Non-broadcast Advertising Code.

The Government’s Online Advertising Programme is creating a new regulatory framework to tackle illegal advertising and to increase protections for children across the online advertising supply chain. We will legislate when parliamentary time allows, and will publish a second consultation on the details of the framework. In the meantime, we have created the Online Advertising Taskforce to bring industry and government together to drive non-legislative action.