Snap Gets Ready For This Year's EU elections

UPDATE: On June 24, 2024, we shared our reflections following the EU Parliamentary elections.

• Overall, the European elections unfolded in a positive online environment with no major threats. This was confirmed by the European Commission and independent observers, who confirmed that they did not observe major online threats.

• Snap saw a small uptick in reported activity, but did not receive or observe any material incidents or threats.

• Our moderation and reporting tools worked well, and none of the reported pieces of content were verified as misinformation on Snapchat.

• In the lead-up to the elections, Snap attended multiple cross-functional stakeholder meetings, including with civil society organizations, regulators, including the European Commission, and other platforms to share information. We believe these stakeholder meetings contributed to the positive outcome, and we look forward to continuing these engagements.

• Snap sent a push notification to over 50 million users to urge them to vote in the elections and made AR election Lenses available to promote civic engagement. We are proud to have done our part to contribute to the highest observed turnout of the last 30 years, with 51.08% of the 357 million eligible citizens participating in the election.

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On May 24, 2024, we published the following blog post on how Snap is preparing for this year's EU elections.

Between 6-9 June, more than 370 million Europeans across 27 countries will head to the voting booths to elect their members for the European Parliament. 

Earlier this year, Snap set out what it was doing to prepare for the more than 50 elections due to be held globally in 2024, including the recent addition of the UK on 4th July. This includes reconvening our longstanding election integrity team, which includes misinformation, political advertising and cybersecurity experts, to monitor all relevant developments for the coming elections.

In addition to this important global work, we wanted to share what we were doing specifically to prepare for the upcoming European elections.

Encouraging civic engagement in EU elections

These European elections will see even more first-time voters eligible to participate – following the decision by Belgium and Germany to join Austria, Malta and Greece in lowering the voting age to 16. 

We believe that civic engagement is one of the most powerful forms of self-expression and have previously worked with election authorities in France, Netherlands, and Sweden to raise awareness of elections and encourage participation. 

Ahead of this year’s EU elections, we have teamed up with the European Parliament on a special AR elections Lens* that encourages people to get out and vote. During the election, we’ll be sharing this Lens with all EU Snapchatters along with a message to remind them to vote and a link to the Parliament’s election website.

Snapchat is also partnering with the European Parliament and European Commission to promote their ‘Use your vote’ information campaign on elections, including a dedicated Lens, and their awareness campaign on the risks of disinformation and deceptive content. 

Combating misinformation across the EU

We are committed to preventing the spread of misinformation. Our Community Guidelines have always prohibited the spread of misinformation and purposefully misleading content – including deepfakes and deceptively manipulated content. 

As technologies have evolved, we have updated our policies to cover all content formats – whether created by a human or generated by artificial intelligence. 

In preparation for the EU elections we have:

• Signed up to the AI Elections Accord, alongside other technology firms, where we pledged to work collaboratively on tools to detect and limit the spread of AI generated content which aims to deceive voters. 

• Introduced contextual symbols to help our community understand when they are interacting with Snap generated AI content.

• Further instructed My AI to avoid engaging on political topics.

• Partnered with Logically Facts, a leading fact checking organisation and signatory of the EU Disinformation Code of Practice, to help fact check political ad statements across the EU.

EU specific changes to our political and advocacy advertising policy

Political ads on Snapchat generally can’t be placed by people or entities that aren’t residents of the country where the ad will run.  However, we’ve recently introduced an exception to allow EU-based advertisers to run European-wide political campaigns on Snap. This brings our political ads policies in line with the recently adopted EU legislation that allows for cross-border political ads within the EU, while still blocking political ads from non-member countries. 

These measures continue to be accompanied by robust integrity safeguards, including a human review process that vets all political ads before they are eligible to appear on our platform.

We believe these steps help encourage our community to exercise their right to vote, and help keep Snapchat a place for safe, responsible, accurate, and helpful news and information. 

* The final live version of the Lens might slightly vary from these previews.