
This Week #17: Week beginning Monday 28 October
A fair bit to cover this week, and it’s been written a little later than usual so please excuse any typos. Some cracking stuff that’s been on my mind though.
Twitter and political ads
Let’s get this over with quickly because it’s been talked about a lot, but I wanted to record my thoughts. This is a good move by Twitter. Sure, not as much money is spent on the platform compared to Facebook when it comes to political ads. And yes, it’s good PR. But it’s the right thing to do. It’s a move that recognises there’s a real issue here with paying to reach people with unvetted and potentially misleading messages.
Does Twitter have a bigger problem with specific hate-spewing accounts with large followings and then networked accounts sharing content organically to have significant influence? Yes. So their ad decision doesn’t solve everything. But it’s a significant shot across the tech sector for sure. Which is a good thing.
It’s one to keep an eye on too though if this is anything to go by; climate change and healthcare? Oof.
Don’t forget to ask questions
I’m still quite new in my job, and there’s a lot going on that I don’t know about. However, I found that I was forgetting to ask questions. I forgot to remember that that’s ok, and it’s the only way you learn. Weird. Of course everyone knows this. But perhaps because I wanted to feel like I knew stuff. Anyway. Things are much more productive if you enquire, and you’ll find quite often that others benefit from your questioning too, so don’t ever feel you can’t.
Facebook and “social issues”
Big one, this. The latter part of my week has been spent considering just what impact will be had by health content now being labelled a “social issue” by Facebook. What does this mean? Well…
Advertisers running ads about social issues, elections or politics may be required to complete the ad authorisation process. However, requirements vary by country. If the authorisation process to run these types of ads is available in your country, you should see your country below with country-specific information.
Is the UK one of these countries? You bet it is. And then what happens?
Ads about social issues, elections or politics that appear on Facebook or Instagram should include a disclaimer provided by advertisers that shows the name of the person or entity that paid for the ad.
All you need to know is here in Facebook’s help section.

Now. If, say, you were a large national service for health, this might cause some pause for thought should you run multiple campaigns across various bodies on the platform. And one might need to take time to converse with internal stakeholders, agencies and a social network to understand what this means in practice.
If you are a health charity, in theory, you are also going to be impacted by this. Your content is health related, and somewhat sensibly, some form of authorisation to ensure that people know that stuff in their feeds is “reputable” makes sense. But you’re gonna want to check this out.
How all this will be moderated, and whether they’re really just focusing on proper political ads for now is yet to be seen, but I’ll be talking about it more and will share what I learn, if possible.
Oh and what will this all actually look like?
At the top of each ad about social issues, elections or politics, there will be a disclaimer that specifies the individual or organisation that paid for the ad.

Have fun!
Facebook and health tools
Facebook’s dipping it’s toe into personal digital healthcare tools. No surprise.

Preventative Health launched this week, and focuses on heart disease and cancer, in the US.
VERY INTERESTING. And they’ve gone into detail about privacy and health data too, which is an obvious concern people might have. Basically no one sees your info and no ads can be targeted at you as a result.
This builds on previous forays into health such as getting people to donate blood. Health data’s a big thing. But will people trust Facebook with such sensitive info? Arguably there is massive potential to have significant impact on people’s health here, so it’ll be good to keep an eye on this.
Wordcounter
This is a clever little tool. You put in a load of text and it creates a word cloud of the most popular words. Nothing really new or remarkable necessarily, except it does it pretty well and is very interesting to see. This one is made with all the Page posts from the NHS UK Facebook Page between 1 Jan and 30 Sept.

I want to look at how we can use it to identify themes from campaigns with significant reach so that we can see what stands out and therefore what we might need to focus on.
And just quickly…
- A report about brands on Instagram. Live is dead. IGTV is meh. Stories are more popular than The Grid. Some of this we know, but there’s still some stuff in here worth having a look through. Not perfect, but quite interesting none-the-less.
- The Election Tech Handbook. A handy resource for people wanting to build techy things during the election. Tip of the hat to Ade for sharing this.
- If you share content from a closed Facebook Group with journalists, you are not a very nice person.
- Unrelated; Facebook Groups let you set up keyword alerts to notify you about specific things being discussed. This might actually not be new, but it was new to me so here you go. Pretty useful to spot recurring contentious issues that give you moderation headaches. Find it under your Group settings somewhere.

- Cute stuff from The Goodness Bot on Twitter:
- The number of impressions does not equal the number of people impressed.
- BONUS LATE ADDITION: Innocent and Age UK launch their 2019 knitted hat thing. This has been going on for a good number of years and it always looks amazing. It’s a top partnership and this launch video from this morning is lovely. Applause.
Switch off your phone this weekend and enjoy some peace. Have fun.

