Facebook and Twitter Add More Ways to See Who Are Behind Ads as November Election Nears
The U.S. elections are fast looming as November approaches, and this time, social media giants Facebook and Twitter are promising to be more transparent about ads on their platforms. Both platforms have announced new programs that will reveal more information about who is buying exposure, for political purposes or otherwise.
Facebook has just announced a new and expanded View Ads program this Thursday, June 28, and the new service claims to increase transparency for "issue ads," as well as clearly electoral pieces of promotion.
These "issue ads" mostly deal with hot-button topics and political issues commonly debated across the country, and Facebook is now requiring authorization before advertisers can run them, the same way that only authorized ad accounts can now run election ads.
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"I don't think any company has come close to the amount of transparency we've put out in our ads system and ad guidelines," chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said at a press event announcing the new changes, as quoted by CNBC.
In the name of transparency, Facebook has claimed to have included more classifications under its political ads policy, at the possible risk of misclassification as feared by marketers and business pages. It was a risk the social media platform was willing to take, according to Sandberg.
"In order to be more inclusive, we decided to include everything. But it was a hard decision," she said.
In the meantime, Twitter has also opened up its ads records via a new service it calls the Ad Transparency Center. The social media giant also announced the change on Thursday, beginning by showing all the ad campaigns that have been run on Twitter over the past seven days.
These campaigns were also tagged with billing information, amount spent on the promotion, how many times the ad was loaded by a viewer — the all-important "impression" metric, as well as the ad's intended audience.
