Twitter has now bolstered its advertising transparency initiative with the launch of a new tool called the Ad Transparency Center. As its name implies, the company eventually plans to show an in-depth look at all of the ad campaigns run on its social network. For the time being, it’s only showing U.S. political advertising for federal election campaign ads that fall under its latest Political Campaigning Policy. That focus likely has a lot to do with concerns about the effects of social media on those types of elections. More specifically, the company wants to stave off any worries that it hasn’t done enough to ensure that those ads are clearly marked and detailed properly to prevent confusion. Having said that, the tool is also going to be available to anybody around the world to use irrespective of whether or not they happen to have a Twitter account and it won’t just show whether something is an advertisement or who the advertisers are.
In its current iteration, users can effectively perform a search of those types of advertisements posted over the past seven days. For now, searches are performed by the advertiser’s handle. That means users will need to know which advertiser they are looking for. That won’t necessarily be difficult given the company’s recently announced visual badge system which clearly marks advertisers on the platform. Moreover, the badge will now feature a plethora of information of their own, without a user needing to go to the Ad Transparency Center. That will be encompassed in a disclaimer showing whether or not a political candidate has endorsed the advertising and payment information. The Transparency Center itself will provide similar information but will also reveal impression data and the targeted demographic. The latter of those will, in effect, paint a clearer picture of who, exactly, a given political ad was intended for.
In the future, Twitter plans to push its new transparency tools further to include all advertisers on the social media platform. There’s no timeframe for that yet since the company is primarily focused on clarifying political lines to avoid election tampering and accusations of that. However, the company isn’t necessarily in a rush about the matter either. Instead, Twitter says it wants to take this slow and make sure that the feature is properly implemented the first time. A clear outline of its official ads policy is set to follow the introduction of Ads Transparency Center, in the near-term.
Ads Transparency Center
