Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have both announced major changes to their advertising processes in order to improve transparency.
From today, Facebook will show the ads a page is currently running, regardless of whether the ads are shown to users.
Facebook is doing this by rolling out an ‘Info & Ads’ section on Pages globally. This feature shows the ads currently running from a Page and is available to anyone on Facebook.
Pages on Facebook will also now have more info, like recent name changes and when a Page was created for people to see.
Additionally, news ads with political content will now be in a separate section of the archive, distinguishing sponsored news from political ads.
Will Easton, managing director of Facebook for Australia and New Zealand, said: “Australians can now see all the active ads run by a page on Facebook. This is a significant step to make Pages and ads more transparent.
“It is the latest in a series of new features and tools that we have introduced to give users more insights into how advertisers are using our platform.”
Meanwhile, Twitter has announced the launch of the Ads Transparency Center, which allows anyone across the globe to view ads that have been served on the platform.
Through the Ads Transparency Center, people can search for any Twitter handle to bring up all ad campaigns from that account that have run for the past seven days, without even needing to log in to Twitter.
Want to find out who is advertising on Twitter? ?
Today we launched the Ads Transparency Center, which lets you do just that. pic.twitter.com/LYs8mpm3x6
— Twitter (@Twitter) June 28, 2018
Twitter’s general manager of revenue product and engineering, Bruce Falck, revealed in a blog that the platform will be launching a specific issue ads policy in the future, as well as enhancements to the Ads Transparency Center itself.
“In addition, we are examining how to adapt and internationalise both political campaigning and issue ads policies,” he said.
“We are doing our due diligence to get this right and will have more updates to come. We stay committed to iterating and improving our work in this space, and doing what’s right for our community.”
