Rejected petition Tighten rules on political advertising

Political advertising is currently not held to the standards of truthfulness, decency or honesty required in commercial advertising. We apply far stricter rules when selling a toaster, than when selling the electorate a manifesto. We require the same high standards for all advertising.

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True democracy can only stem from an informed populace, and misinformation undermines this principle.

The most obvious example of this recently comes from the EU referendum, where the Leave campaign repeatedly claimed that we spend £350m per week on the EU.

This figure was robustly shown to be untrue early on in the campaign, but continued to feature prominently on advertising throughout. The ASA was unable to act on inaccurate information due to the exemptions on political advertising.

This petition was rejected

Why was this petition rejected?

There’s already a petition about this issue. We cannot accept a new petition when we already have one about a very similar issue.

You are more likely to get action on this issue if you sign and share a single petition.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/154617

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.

Date submitted 24 June 2016
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