FIGHTING DIRTY MONEY SCANDALS:
Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2025 6:41 am
INDUSTRIAL POLICY COMMISSIONER? Margrethe Vestager could not stop talking about industrial strategy at a recent news conference when she announced a €242 million fine for chipmaker Qualcomm for trying to force a smaller competitor, Icera, out of the market for chipsets. She left the door open to taking on such a portfolio herself.
Introducing uniform anti-money laundering rules and a single EU authority to enforce them would mitigate future dirty money scandals, the European Commission said today. The EU’s executive arm made the suggestion in a package of reports that analyze what went wrong in a series of scandals between 2012 and 2018 in 10 different banks.
BACK IN PARLIAMENT: One of the European People’s Party’s newest parliamentary assistants is Francisco de Paula Gambus, a former MEP.
SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF telegram data FACEBOOK POLITICAL ADS: Ever since Russian actors pushed false messages to voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been on the defensive about how it tackles both disinformation and political ads on its global platform. It has removed millions of accounts, created ‘war rooms’ to tackle these problems during elections, and built an online transparency register aimed at allowing anyone to track who bought paid-for ads across Facebook and Instagram.
There’s just one problem: it’s not working. According to several researchers who spoke with POLITICO’s tech team, the online political ad register is almost impossible to use for mass data collection and analysis of political ads. The system itself is incredibly buggy; it often times out when searching for ads; and lots of basic information (like in-depth demographic information on how users are targeted) just doesn’t exist. “If you don’t have a PhD in computer science and have experience of dealing with data, it’s almost impossible to access this data,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU who’s been working with Facebook’s political ad data for more than a year.
Introducing uniform anti-money laundering rules and a single EU authority to enforce them would mitigate future dirty money scandals, the European Commission said today. The EU’s executive arm made the suggestion in a package of reports that analyze what went wrong in a series of scandals between 2012 and 2018 in 10 different banks.
BACK IN PARLIAMENT: One of the European People’s Party’s newest parliamentary assistants is Francisco de Paula Gambus, a former MEP.
SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF telegram data FACEBOOK POLITICAL ADS: Ever since Russian actors pushed false messages to voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been on the defensive about how it tackles both disinformation and political ads on its global platform. It has removed millions of accounts, created ‘war rooms’ to tackle these problems during elections, and built an online transparency register aimed at allowing anyone to track who bought paid-for ads across Facebook and Instagram.
There’s just one problem: it’s not working. According to several researchers who spoke with POLITICO’s tech team, the online political ad register is almost impossible to use for mass data collection and analysis of political ads. The system itself is incredibly buggy; it often times out when searching for ads; and lots of basic information (like in-depth demographic information on how users are targeted) just doesn’t exist. “If you don’t have a PhD in computer science and have experience of dealing with data, it’s almost impossible to access this data,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU who’s been working with Facebook’s political ad data for more than a year.