Twitter provides information on political advertisements in brand-new openness center

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Twitter gives details on political ads in new transparency center

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As your Twitter feed fills with advertisements for the midterm elections, prepare to get more info about who spent for the advertisements– and why they may have targeted any provided advertisement at you.

Twitter is making that info offered in its Ads Transparency Center, which it revealedThursday It’s a website where anybody can search for any marketer on the social networks platform and see all the advertisements they operated on Twitter that week. When it pertains to political marketers connected with projects and political leaders in federal elections, Twitter will supply extra info about just how much marketers invested and what elements they picked to customize the advertisements to particular Twitter users.

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What’s more, the company is adding information to ads when you see them in your feed, including a badge that marks it as political.

“This will allow users to easily identify political campaign ads, know who paid for them, and whether it was authorized by a candidate,” Bruce Falck, Twitter’s general manager of revenue product, wrote in a blog post announcing the new features.

The announcement comes after Twitter, along with Google and Facebook, faced questioning from US lawmakers about political messaging on social media during the 2016 presidential election season. Pointing to findings from US intelligence agencies that the Russian government conducted an online campaign of misinformation and division, lawmakers asked what the social media companies were doing to make sure political advertisers were legitimate and following campaign finance laws. At the time, Twitter was the only company that would commit to not taking foreign money for political ads in the US.

Since then, all three companies have announced they’ll do more to identify political ads and keep users informed about who’s paying for them. In May, Facebook released a searchable archive of political ads from its site and Instagram. Google said it would release a transparency report about political ad spending on its services, which include YouTube.

Twitter’s ad transparency center and political ad markings apply only to federal elections, as does its policy on political advertising in the US.

In the future, the company plans to introduce a policy for “issues ads,” Falck said in Thursday’s announcement. That would seem to apply to state and local elections (US federal elections only pertain to elected seats and not voter initiatives or referendums).

Twitter says it’s looking into to introduce features for political ads in state and local elections in the future, but hasn’t committed to doing so.

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