Paid-for political advertising on TV and radio has always been banned in the UK. But there’s no such restriction on using YouTube, and BuzzFeed News understands the Conservatives are already spending the money.

US-style political attack ads have quietly come to the UK, thanks to the Conservatives using a loophole in election rules to target voters by using paid-for YouTube ads.

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YouTube viewers in marginal constituencies told BuzzFeed News they have recently begun seeing paid-for "pre-roll" adverts from the Conservatives attacking Ed Miliband and linking him to Alex Salmond and Gerry Adams.

The new campaign tactic, a first in UK politics, enables the Tories to completely bypass Britain's strict ban on paid-for political TV adverts and allows the party substantially more freedom to target video adverts at individuals in marginal constituencies.

What's more, unlike expensively produced political party broadcasts which are shown in carefully allocated slots on national TV channels, this form of YouTube advertising could enable the Conservatives to produce fast-turnaround negative attack adverts within hours based on recent events.

The party can then pay for these to be pushed out to hundreds of thousands of individual voters using the video-sharing site. This gives the Conservatives a massive campaigning advantage over their rivals and allows them to reach potential voters who do not read newspapers or watch TV.

While the UK's political parties have been uploading clips to YouTube for years in the hope they go viral of their own accord, the Conservatives appear to have taken the game-changing decision to spend substantial sums of money actively putting them in front of viewers.

In 2013 the courts narrowly upheld the continued ban on political advertising on British TV but the growth of online video advertising risks making this decision irrelevant.

The Conservatives have an enormous amount of money allocated to online advertising during the campaign and are already spending around £100,000 a month on Facebook adverts alone. Now they have a direct route to the tens of millions of Britons who watch videos on YouTube every month.

A Labour insider said the party does not have the same funds and as a result does not intend to spend money on YouTube adverts, meaning one of the internet's most successful forms of advertising will only be available to the Conservatives during the general election. Labour has repeatedly complained that they will be massively outspent during the general election by the Tories, who have raised enormous sums from donors in the financial sector.

A spokesman for the Electoral Commission said they are unaware of any laws restricting paid-for YouTube political advertising in the UK, with the only limit being existing limits on how much a party can spend during a campaign.

"All the party has to report is the cost of spending on advert targeted at voters during a general election," the spokesperson said.

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