While the Labour Party and its candidates break the rules and flood your online space with their advertising (see this earlier article on why that’s a bad thing), Google cashes the money. They’re not going to put a stop to this unless enough people ask them. Here’s how you can do your bit.

When you see a political advert run by Google Ads click on the little light blue cross on its top right corner. Google will give you the option to “Stop seeing this ad” but will also ask you to tell them “Why this ad?” Why is it you don’t want to see it anymore. Click on that question.

What comes next is how you know whether the Labour Party or the candidate complied with the rules on Google political ads. Is there a section “About the advertiser”? If there isn’t, they broke the rules, (and you can proceed with the instructions below).

If it does have an “About the advertiser” section and it says “Partit Laburista” or the name of the candidate, check if the section also includes a link to give you the option to “View the Transparency Report for this advertiser’s election ads.” You’ll find a section like that with PN adverts and a fraction of the PL adverts because they do it to seem like they’re paying for some of the ads. In most cases there is no link to the Transparency Report and that is because they uploaded the advert but hid from Google the fact that it is political and subject to the rules on political advertising.

So, here’s what to do next. Click “Report this ad”. You’ll be given a list of possible reasons why you’re reporting, and you should report the ad for being in violation of Goggle Ads policies. For so it as Google Ads policies say that political adverts should identify who paid for them and logged as political ads.

You will be asked to “provide additional details” and there simply type “Political ad without label”. Like so.

Naturally in the unlikely event that you see PN adverts breaking the rules in the same way (I haven’t seen any), report them as well.

You’ll be told (and I’ll be accused) of seeking to suppress Labour’s freedom of expression. Which is rubbish. This is nothing like Labour trolls reporting your Facebook account to be shut down on the false accusation that you’re racist because you said Robert Abela is a baby.

Political advertising online is managed in these policies because this sort of unbridled propaganda has been used to manipulate results in sophisticated democracies like the Brexit referendum or the 2016 US elections. It is likely that in an earlier phase of Vladimir Putin’s war on democracy, the possibility to hide the source of funding of these adverts let him wage war on citizen’s ability to be free of a constant assault of propaganda online.

There is no regulator in Malta that will get out of bed to protect your right to be protected from this online gang rape. No electoral commission is going to force Labour to function within the rules. No internal official in the Labour Party is going to grow a conscience and act with restraint like the PN is doing.

But here’s something you can do yourself to push back on the people who are trying to bully you. Now go on and do it.