Social media giants have recently been criticised heavily for their role in enabling the spread of fake news and misleading stories – be it about 2016 US Presidential elections where Russian propaganda ruled Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and other major websites.
One of the main factors was ads on the social networks, which Facebook has tried to make more transparent, and Twitter too has today launched a new Ads Transparency Center (ATC) to allow users to see what all ads an account is running on the platform.
Twitter had first announced this transparency tool back in October last year and is now keeping its promise by making it available to everyone. Twitter will now let users to search for usernames and view all ad campaigns (promoted tweets) run by an account in the past 7 days.
The highlight of this feature is that ad campaigns will be visible to any and all Internet users, not specifically Twitter users.
You can head over to the Ads Transparency Center via this link right here and see every promoted tweet associated with an account, without even having the need to log in. The details will look something like this:
However, the information is not restricted to just the list of promoted tweets for an account. Twitter will highlight the activity of US political advertisers and will show additional data, such as the billing info, ad spend, impression data per tweet and even demographic targeting. Talking about the ATC in the blog post, Twitter’s Bruce Falck states that,
We will be launching a specific issue ads policy in the future, as well as enhancements to the Ads Transparency Center itself. We are doing our due diligence to get this right and will have more updates to come.
And it is not just Twitter who’s looking to minimize scrutiny over its ads and give you the power to identify accounts that run ads. Facebook has also taken similar steps to improve accountability for advertisers and prevent any form of abuse on its platform. It’ll also show users the ads run by a business or Page on Facebook-owned platforms such as Instagram, Messenger as well as partner networks.
