In a blog post published on Wednesday, Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced that it would no longer give advertisers the ability of targeting election ads using data, such as general political affiliations and public voter records. This move comes at a time of rising pressure on social media platforms over the way they handle political advertising, ahead of the U.S. presidential elections to be held in 2020. According to the search engine giant, it would impose restriction related to audience targeting for election ads, which would include gender, age and also general location on level with postal code.
Contextual targeting would be possible for political advertisers, which means they would be able to serve ads to those reading up about a certain topic. Before the change, it had been possible for political advertisers to target the ads by taking advantage of the data that was gleaned from their behaviors like their search actions. This could be useful in categorizing them as right-leaning, left-leaning or entirely independent. They also had the freedom of uploading data, such as the voter file lists for targeting ads to a similar audience that exhibited the same behaviors as those that were part of the data.
The new approach will be implemented in the United Kingdom by Google during the week, ahead of their general elections to be held on December 12th. The search engine company stated that the same would be imposed in the European Union by the end of this year. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the new policy would be implemented from January 6th, 2020 and onwards. A blog post was published by the vice president of Google Ads’ product management, Scott Spenser. In it, he stated that due to recent debates and concerns about political advertising and for establishing trust in the democratic process, the company had decided to improve the confidence of the voters in the political ads they would come across on their ad platforms.
After these changes, it is expected that political campaigns would shift some of their ads to Google’s smaller rivals as well as television. FlexPoint Media purchases ads for Repbulican campaigns and its chief executive, Tim Cameron, stated that they will not license Google’s ad-buying tool post January due to the new restrictions that would be imposed. FlexPoint had used the voter file feature for targeting people who didn’t cast a ballot regularly and encouraging them to do so. Cameron said that not being able to target people in this way could reduce civic participation and wouldn’t allow underfunded candidates to get support.
Moreover, Google had also provided examples to show it wouldn’t allow false claims to be made regarding election results or the eligibility of political candidates based on their birthplace or age. The company also made it clear that its new policy for political as well as non-political ads prohibit manipulated and doctored media. These policies have been introduced in light of the controversy regarding the previous US presidential campaign in 2016.
You must be logged in to post a comment.