Anyone who has run an election campaign over the past ten years has an almost automatic reflex: open Business Manager, upload the budget, target by municipality, age range, and interests, and start pushing ads.
Today, that reflex runs straight into a wall.
Since fall 2025, the way political communication is handled online in Europe has changed more than it had throughout the previous decade, and many candidates, campaign staff, and consultants will only realize it when they try to launch their first campaign.
This guide is the starting point for a five-part series designed for candidates, campaign staff, and anyone who, even outside politics, communicates about issues that are considered political.
The goal is simple: understand what can still be done, what can no longer be done, and where to shift energy and budget ahead of upcoming elections, starting with the 2027 general election.
The Change in One Sentence: The Regulation Doesn’t Ban It, the Platforms Do
On October 10, 2025, Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, commonly known as the TTPA, became applicable.
The regulation does not prohibit political advertising. It does, however, impose much stricter transparency requirements and targeting restrictions than before, and these apply across the entire chain: to whoever pays for the advertising, whoever prepares the campaign, and whoever publishes it.
The response from the major platforms was decisive.
Meta announced that starting in early October 2025, it would no longer accept political, electoral, or social issue advertising in the European Union, arguing that the regulation’s requirements were impractical.
Google had already done the same a few weeks earlier, shutting down political advertising on Search, YouTube, and its display network throughout the EU.
TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, meanwhile, had never allowed political advertising in the first place.
The practical result is a paradox.
The European Commission keeps saying that the regulation does not ban anything, and formally speaking, that is correct.
But if the two operators that together accounted for almost all digital election spending have closed their doors, then for an Italian candidate, the difference between “prohibited” and “unavailable” is merely academic.
What Counts as Political Advertising Under the TTPA
The first mistake to avoid is thinking that the issue only concerns digital campaign posters featuring a candidate’s face and party logo.
The regulation’s definition is much broader, and understanding where the line is drawn is what separates a prepared campaign team from one that discovers the rules halfway through a campaign.
The Two Criteria: Who Is Speaking and What Are They Trying to Achieve?
A message is considered political advertising when it is disseminated, generally for payment or as part of an organized campaign, by or on behalf of a political actor.
But it can also qualify regardless of who signs it if it is capable of influencing the outcome of an election, referendum, legislative or regulatory process, or voting behavior.
The second criterion is the surprising one.
A trade association that pays to promote a post opposing a proposed regional law can fall within the scope of the rules just as a mayoral candidate can.
What Falls Outside the Scope
The rules exclude personal political opinions, unpaid editorial content, messages from political actors that are purely private or purely commercial in nature, and official institutional communications from public authorities.
A candidate’s organic post about their day, therefore, is not political advertising.
It becomes political advertising when someone pays to give it visibility, whether through a sponsored post, a paid creator, or an agency managing its distribution.
To navigate uncertain cases, the European Commission has published interpretive guidelines on the regulation with practical examples.
It is worth reading them before setting up any media plan.
The Main Requirements, Explained Without Legal Jargon
Even though Meta and Google have shut down political advertising, the TTPA continues to apply to everything else: online publications, programmatic advertising, radio, billboards, print media, and creators.
Anyone running political advertising through any medium, online or offline, therefore needs to understand the basic requirements.
Labeling and Transparency Notice
Every political advertisement must be clearly identifiable as such with a label and must link to an easily accessible transparency notice.
The notice identifies the sponsor, who controls the sponsor, how much was spent, which election or political process the message relates to, and, if targeting techniques were used, which ones.
The format of these labels was standardized by the European Commission through an implementing regulation issued in July 2025.
Sponsor Declaration
Whoever commissions the advertising must declare to the provider that it is political advertising.
It may sound like a bureaucratic detail, but it shifts responsibility.
If a candidate’s staff purchases ad space while presenting it as generic communication, the mistake is theirs before it is the publisher’s.
Targeting: The Core Problem
This is the real reason the platforms withdrew.
Targeting based on personal data is allowed only when that data was collected directly from the individual and that individual gave explicit, separate consent for its use in political advertising.
Profiling based on special categories of data, such as political opinions, religion, sexual orientation, or health, is prohibited, as is the use of data belonging to people who are not yet old enough to vote.
Translated into practical terms: interest-based audiences, lookalikes, and retargeting as we have known them are not compatible with a political campaign.
Anyone trying to replicate them through other tools must first ask a very simple question:
Do I have the explicit consent of every one of these people?
The Ban on Non-EU Sponsors
During the three months preceding an election or referendum, providers cannot offer political advertising services to sponsors from third countries.
The rule is designed to prevent foreign interference, but it also affects committees and supporters based outside the European Union.
The European Advertising Repository
The old ad libraries operated by Meta and Google no longer document European political advertising.
The regulation provides for a public European repository of online political advertisements, for which the European Commission defined the technical specifications in April 2026.
It is still being launched, but once fully operational, every online political advertisement will be accessible to anyone, including political opponents.
The Italian Rules the TTPA Did Not Eliminate
The European regulation establishes a common minimum standard, but it does not replace national rules.
Candidates running in Italy still have to deal with an existing framework that many people know only by hearsay.
Equal Access Rules
Law No. 28 of 2000 regulates access to media during election campaigns, including political communications and self-produced messages on radio and television, limits on messages in the press, and the ban on publishing polls during the 15 days preceding the vote.
For every election, AGCOM adopts an implementing resolution, and in its most recent resolutions it has explicitly referenced the TTPA, asking online platforms to clearly identify paid political messages.
Election Silence
Law No. 212 of 1956 prohibits electoral campaigning on the day before the vote and on voting days.
Its application to the web has long been debated because the law was created for rallies and billboards, but the principle applies, and the reputational risk of openly violating it on social media is real.
The cautious approach is not to publish campaign content or have paid content running on those days.
Election Spending and Reporting
Campaign spending, including digital advertising, must be reported according to the rules applicable to each type of election.
For general elections, the relevant framework is Law No. 515 of 1993, which establishes spending limits and an electoral representative.
An ads budget paid with a staff member’s personal card is not a workaround. It is a problem.
The Platform Landscape Today
This is the picture every candidate should have in front of them before writing a media plan.
Platform policies change, so they should be checked again shortly before a campaign, but the underlying landscape has remained stable for the past year.
Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads
No political, electoral, or social issue advertising in the EU.
The restriction also covers sponsored content from candidates that does not explicitly mention voting. A boosted post about healthcare or immigration, for example, could be classified as a social issue and rejected.
Organic content remains fully available, as do WhatsApp channels and communities.
Google and YouTube
Political advertising in the EU is also suspended here, across Search, YouTube, and the display network, as set out in Google’s political content policies.
Anyone searching for a candidate’s name will therefore see only organic results, making the quality of the candidate’s website, profile, and online reputation more important than any advertising campaign.
TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest
These platforms have always prohibited political advertising.
TikTok also extends its ban to branded content from creators who are paid to communicate political messages, an important point for anyone considering influencers as a way around the restrictions.
X
It is the only major platform that maintains a political advertising program with advertiser certification.
Its actual availability in Italy and the conditions for TTPA compliance must be verified on a case-by-case basis before planning any budget, and the audience that can be reached is in any case very different from Facebook’s.
Everything Else
Online publications, programmatic advertising, digital audio, billboards, local press, radio, and television remain available, subject to the TTPA and equal access rules.
This is where, in practice, the budgets of upcoming campaigns are likely to shift.
The Problem Nobody Is Considering: Social Issues
There is a category of actors that the TTPA and the platforms’ withdrawal have affected without receiving much attention: people and organizations that are not candidates but communicate about public issues.
Associations, NGOs, unions, professional organizations, and companies running campaigns about sustainability, employment, or rights all fall into this category.
Meta has blocked not only electoral advertising but also advertising about social issues, and its automated classification systems are not always precise.
An ad discussing high rents, climate, or public healthcare can be stopped even if the organization behind it sells a service and has no political ambitions whatsoever.
For anyone working in marketing in sectors close to these issues, this is an operational risk to understand beforehand, not after an ad is rejected.
What This Means for Candidates
If paid campaigns on the platforms where most attention is concentrated are no longer an option, what is left?
Everything that for years was considered secondary because ads made it unnecessary.
Organic content remains, but it needs to be treated as a programming schedule rather than a bulletin board.
Your own lists remain, including email, WhatsApp, and SMS, built with explicit consent and therefore fully usable.
Offline channels remain as well, returning to a level of importance that digital advertising had eroded.
And search reputation remains important, because voters who want to understand who you are will search for you on Google and find only what you have built beforehand.
In other words, the competitive advantage has shifted from budget to time.
Those who start building an audience, content, and lists months before the campaign reach election day with an asset that no opponent can simply buy during the final three weeks.
The Deeper-Dive Series
This guide opens a hub dedicated to online political communication in Italy.
The upcoming articles will explore each component in detail: the TTPA explained point by point for candidates and campaign staff, the channels where political advertising is still possible today and under what rules, organic strategy for a campaign without ads, the use of creators and influencers and the point at which they become political advertising, and finally the risks for companies and associations communicating about social issues.
If you are preparing to run for office, or you work on the campaign staff of someone who is, and you want to build a communications strategy that takes these rules into account from day one, get in touch with me.
Starting with a plan built around the current regulatory landscape costs far less than discovering the rules after the campaign is already underway.
