With the midterm elections coming up, Twitter users will have to brace themselves for a barrage of ads. But this time around, they’ll also be getting information on who paid for those ads and why they received said advertisement.
Twitter recently announced that it’s making more critical information accessible in its Ads Transparency Center. Users now have a dashboard where they can check up on an advertiser on Twitter and see the ads that they ran on the social media platform that week.
Additional information will also be provided for political ads that are linked to specific politicians and campaigns in federal elections. The Ads Transparency Center will make critical details open to the public, like how much advertisers have paid or spent and the factors used to target particular users. Twitter will also be marking those ads with a badge to indicate that it’s a political advertisement.
According to Bruce Falck, Twitter’s Revenue Product general manager, the badge and extra information will “allow users to easily identify political campaign ads, know who paid for them, and whether it was authorized by a candidate.”
The news about the Ads Transparency Center came on the heels of American lawmakers questioning social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter about political messaging during the last presidential election.
Lawmakers have previously asked these companies what they were doing to ensure that political ads running on their platforms were legal and followed campaign laws on finance. This is crucial, especially in the wake of intelligence agency findings that the Russian government may have instigated an online campaign of division and misinformation.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have already committed to doing more to classify political ads and inform users on who bought them. Facebook rolled out a searchable political ads archive on its platform as well as on Instagram in May. Meanwhile, Google announced it would soon release a report regarding political ad spending on its services.