In anticipation of the upcoming midterm elections, Twitter is rolling out phase two of its efforts to bring more transparency around political ad campaigns.
Starting today, anyone around the globe will be able to search ads displayed on Twitter within the last seven days via the app’s new Ad Transparency Center. The searchable database is available to everyone, meaning you won’t have to have a Twitter account to perform a search. Twitter’s Ad Transparency Center will include ads from Twitter advertisers, both in the US and global advertisers; although with this rollout, the only searchable political ads are ones attached to US elections.
“To view ads from any advertiser you will be able to simply search for a specific handle and see the creative for all ad campaigns that have run within the last seven days from that handle,” writes Twitter’s head of revenue products and engineering group, Bruce Falck, on the company’s advertising blog.
Twitter has plans to eventually include ads for political elections outside the US but says more research needs to be done on that front: “We are examining how to adapt and internationalize both political campaigning and issue ads policies. We are doing our due diligence to get this right and will have more updates to come.”
For US political ad campaigns that fall under Twitter’s new Political Campaigning Policy, Twitter’s Ad Transparency Center will also display billing information for the advertiser, ad spend, impression data per tweet and demographic targeting data.
On May 30, Twitter launched the first phase of its effort to address abuse and the malicious behavior that plagued the platform during the 2016 elections. The company began including labels on US midterm election candidates, stating the office the candidate is running for, the state location of the office and the district number. US midterm political candidates also got a “clearly identifiable” small icon of a government building beside their name within their Twitter bio.
Facebook is also taking up the fight to tackle abuse on its platform. The company has recently outlined new rules around political ads and rolled out a similar searchable database of political ad campaigns. F
With so much hanging on this year’s US election cycle, and in light of evidence that Russian groups used social media to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, many platforms have been updating their policies for political ads. To help keep track of of these changes, we’ve compiled the latest political ad policies of each of the major platforms in one place: The big list of political ad policies from leading social & search platforms.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.