The non-governmental democracy watchdog Gong called for tighter and more transparent regulation of political advertising on social networks on Monday, in the run up to the European election due to be held in late May.

In a press release, Gong condemned what they called “silence of Croatian government institutions” on the issue of online advertising.

“The silence of Finance Minister Zdravko Maric, and the vagueness of the election commission’s rules which deal with ensuring the transparency of online advertising is unacceptable to us – as those rules should be brought in line with recommendadtions of the European Council which Croatia had supported,” Gong said.

Meanwhile, Facebook has released a tool for researchers and reporters which will allow anyone to look into political advertising on their network, identifying who paid for the ads, how much they spent on Facebook advertising, and who was the targeted audience.

The new rules came into effect on March 29, and are seen as Facebook’s attempt to respond to criticisms of widespread abuse of targeted political campaigning in previous elections.

“After several months of warnings, appeals, and recommendations on how to reduce threats to democracy on the Internet – which have so far been ignored – we can only say that Facebook – in spite of being a private-owned company – has shown more effort in protecting the integrity of European elections than actual Croatian government agencies,” Gong added.

According to a statement received by the Telegram website last week, the state election commission DIP, which is in charge of collecting and publishing data on political advertising, opined that online advertising does not qualify as a “medium” according to Croatian law, and as such parties and candidates are not required to present their spending on online ads as a separate category.

This means that although they are required to show campaign spending, the cost of online ads will be lumped in together with other forms of advertising, making the online component more difficult to track and check transparently.

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