On Twitter’s New Issue Ads Policy

Mabel Cardec
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

For my MMC5636 class, I selected the headline: “Twitter Announces ‘Issues Ads’ Policy to Stop Manipulation by Politically-Motivated Groups” from SocialMediaToday.com (link right above)

This story by Andrew Hutchinson reports on Twitter’s decision to label in-stream ads from politicians when they advocate for national controversial issues such as abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade. In-stream ads are commercials that appear before, during and after internet videos. They delay or interrupt your videos and last about 15–30 seconds. The ones that play before your videos are called “pre-roll”.

Twitter unfolded this policy, which followed Facebook’s, with the goal of providing more transparency to users, and decrease the opportunity for manipulation on any of the topics mentioned above. Twitter is taken 3 steps with this policy: labeling the issue, providing links to additional content on the issue, and adding a certification process to validate the identity and location of those placing the advertising. The policy will take effect at the end of September.

In my opinion, this is a smart and obliged move by Twitter. As we all know, social media is been blamed as an important influencing vehicle of the 2016 U.S. election. And as we are all closely observing the current investigations related to social media ads placed from Russia, many believe additional secrets and interesting situations will be uncovered. I think this is why and how Twitter is getting ready for the next time (election?) around. But let’s remember also that Twitter is in the business of not losing money. I believe Twitter could be consider the business that could get affected here if they didn’t act quickly. By tightening their policy they assure full disclosure from advertisers (avoiding ill-intentioned posts), while avoiding losing users. This demonstrates one of my takeaways form class, that platforms need to listen to their users and keep them well informed. In this case, they are keeping everyone happy, as well as their pockets.

I believe no one gets affected by this policy and everyone wins. Hopefully social media activity will improve during the upcoming election season. (I know, that’s very naïve of me.) It will be interesting to see how many new creative ways politicians will come up to circumvent Twitter’s new policy.

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