Information for authorities and researchers

Introduction

PolAds.eu is a platform operated by STEP A/S. Advertisers use it to file the transparency notice that Regulation (EU) 2024/900 requires for a political advertisement, and publishers use it to check and authorise that notice before the advertisement runs. Citizens use it to notify a publisher that an advertisement may not comply.

This page tells a national competent authority, a vetted researcher, a civil society organisation, a political actor, a recognised electoral observer or a journalist how to reach us, what we hold, what we will answer and what we do not offer.

Contact point

support@polads.eu

This is our designated contact point under Article 16(5) of Regulation (EU) 2024/900. Write to it for any request under Article 16 or Article 17. It reaches a monitored mailbox on working days.

A subject line naming "Article 16" or "Article 17" reaches us fastest. That address also carries our general enquiries, and naming the Article is what marks your message as one with a deadline attached.

Please state in your first message which capacity you are writing in, which Articles your request concerns, and whether an election or a referendum falls within the next month. That last one changes our deadline, so telling us shortens the answer rather than lengthening it.

What we hold, and on whose behalf

We are the intermediary. We are not the publisher of a political advertisement and we are not its sponsor.

We hold three kinds of record:

• Transparency notices. The Annex II information an advertiser filed and a publisher authorised. A confirmed notice is frozen and cannot be altered afterwards. Every published notice is already public, at its own address, in the language it was filed in, and is available in machine readable form.
• Platform records. Accounts, campaigns and the publication periods a publisher signed off.
• Complaint records. Notifications a citizen submitted under Article 15, and the decision the publisher recorded. These are held on behalf of the publisher who owes the Article 15 duty.

The Article 16 route, for a national competent authority

Article 16 gives a national competent authority the power to request that we transmit information necessary to verify compliance with Articles 9, 11, 12 and 14. It is a request power with deadlines, not a standing right of inspection.

Under Article 16(2) a request carries a statement of the reasons for it, except where it pursues the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of a criminal or serious administrative offence and stating the reasons would jeopardise that objective, together with information on the redress available to us and to the sponsor concerned.

The deadlines we work to:

• Two working days to acknowledge your request and tell you what steps we are taking, under Article 16(3).
• Eight working days to provide the information.
• Forty eight hours where the request concerns information already in our possession and is made in the final month before an election or a referendum, under Article 16(4).

Article 16(3) allows a provider qualifying as a micro, small or medium sized undertaking under Article 3(1), (2) and (3) of Directive 2013/34/EU to make reasonable efforts within twelve working days instead of eight, and Article 16(4) sets a separate rule for micro and small undertakings in the election month. Whether either applies to us is a legal question we will answer in writing when it arises rather than asserting it in advance.

Most Article 16 requests are answerable by pointing at something already published. Articles 9, 11 and 12 information sits on the public transparency notice, and each notice is served in machine readable form at its own address, so a request for it costs you no wait at all.

Article 15 is not in Article 16's list. Complaint case files therefore fall outside the statutory request power. That is a statement about what the regulation requires, not a refusal: we will consider a request for complaint information on its merits, and we will record the decision either way. It means only that an answer there is ours to give rather than yours to compel.

The Article 17 route, for researchers and others

Article 17 gives interested entities a route to the same Article 9, 11 and 12 information.

To qualify you must be independent from commercial interests and fall into at least one of these categories:

• a vetted researcher, in accordance with Article 40(8) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065
• a member of a civil society organisation whose statutory objectives are to protect and promote the public interest, authorised under national or Union law
• a political actor
• a national or international electoral observer recognised in a member state
• a journalist

Please say which one applies to you in your first message. We are not trying to catch anybody out, and a request that states its basis is one we can start work on immediately.

What Article 17 requires of us:

• To transmit the information promptly and free of charge, and in machine readable form where technically possible.
• To provide it, or a reasoned response, at the latest within one month, on a best efforts basis under Article 17(3).

What Article 17 allows us, stated here rather than discovered later:

• Aggregation or banding. Under Article 17(4) we may give amounts in aggregate or in a range, to the extent necessary to protect our legitimate commercial interests.
• Refusal. Under Article 17(5) we may refuse a request that is manifestly unclear, that is excessive, or that concerns information not in our possession. A refusal is a reasoned response, and it carries information about the redress available to you, including the collective redress route under Directive (EU) 2020/1828 where it applies.
• A fee. Under Article 17(6), where processing a request entails significant costs, we may charge a reasonable and proportionate fee, which will never exceed the administrative cost of providing the information.

Under Article 17(7) the burden of demonstrating that any of those applies rests with us. We will demonstrate it rather than assert it.

Public figures

Aggregate figures on complaints are published at /statistics and need no request at all. They are platform wide, updated each quarter, and subject to thresholds that keep any single complaint, advertiser or publisher from being picked out of them. Each closed quarter is frozen and archived at its own address, so a figure you cite does not move when later data lands. The same figures are served in machine readable form at /api/public/complaint-stats.

The public register of transparency notices is searchable at /search, and every published notice is served in machine readable form at its own address.

Article 14 attaches a periodic reporting duty about political advertising services to the publisher, as information appended to their management report, and micro, small and medium sized undertakings are exempt from it under Article 14(2). So a request to us for figures during an election period is answered by the public statistics rather than by a private feed.

What we do not offer

We say this explicitly because it is the most useful thing on this page:

• No standing access. There is no continuous or automatic access to our records.
• No authority accounts. We issue no logins to authorities, researchers, observers or journalists, and there is no authority role in our access model.
• No country filtered live view. We operate no per country feed and no dashboard of complaints or notices scoped to a member state.
• No bulk case file export. Complaint case files are not exported on request as a matter of course.

Every route to us is a request, answered within the deadlines above. A request channel and public figures are what Regulation (EU) 2024/900 provides for, and they are what we provide.

If you disagree with our answer

Tell us, at the contact point above, and say why. If we refused your request we will already have given you our reasons and your redress options in writing. You may also raise the matter with the competent authority in your own member state.