Sweden · general election 2026-09-13
The unlabeled campaign
On October 10, 2025, Meta stopped selling political ads in the EU rather than comply with the TTPA. Swedish parties went silent overnight — and the campaign moved to actors no rule covers.
What happened
Before the ban, the 62 political and politically adjacent pages we track launched about 114 political ads a week, reaching 4M people weekly — roughly 40% of it from party pages. Since the ban they launch about 47 a week reaching 1.4M: the ban cut political advertising to roughly a third of its former intensity, and every ad that remains runs with no political label, no targeting restriction, and no transparency obligation.
What remains comes from unions, business federations, advocacy organisations and — above all — media outlets owned by political organisations. Not one post-ban ad comes from a party or politician page.
Political ads per week
Weekly launches of classifier-identified political ads by tracked pages, trailing twelve weeks. The pre-election ramp is visible from mid-August.
Who runs the unlabeled campaign
Post-ban political advertisers by delivered reach. The right-hand figures show each advertiser’s delivered audience: share female and share aged 55 or older — the business-side campaign reaches older men, the environmental and rights campaigns reach women, and the Election Authority’s voter information (the one government page tracked) delivers almost evenly.
How this is measured
Meta no longer classifies any EU ad as political, but the Digital Services Act still obliges it to publish every ad delivered to EU users, with delivered reach, demographics and targeting. Vipima collects that repository daily for 62 tracked Swedish pages — complete since 2025-08-17, spanning the final pre-ban weeks and the entire post-TTPA era (14282 ads to date) — and preserves it beyond Meta’s one-year retention.
Each ad is classified as de facto political messaging or not by a language-model classifier measured continuously against a 144-case hand-labeled evaluation set (95.4% at three iterations per case). Charity fundraising and member recruitment do not count as political; issue advocacy, electioneering and mobilisation do. Reach figures are cumulative ad reach — the same person is counted across multiple ads. Coverage of currently advertising political pages is estimated at roughly 90% by capture–recapture across independent discovery strategies. Ads whose only political content is in images or video are a known blind spot. More on methodology.
Corpus last updated 2026-09-10. Political-ad figures cover ads launched since 2025-10-10 unless noted.