Ever since tech billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter, he vowed to be 100% transparent across all of the app's endeavors.
But a recent report claims Twitter has failed completely in terms of disclosing political ads running across the website. And it's been going on since last month.
The news comes to us thanks to the media outlet Politico mentioning that there were at least three different fundraising tweets getting promoted on the app which never made their way to the app’s own data records. Moreover, it appears it went against the firm’s policies and raised questions about how honest the platform really was and how a lot could possibly go by as unreported.
These Tweets by the platform entailed politicians arising from several different parties including the accounts of important senators. Users were asked to donate to various fundraising campaigns and all of them were related to the label promoted in the feeds of Twitter users. They would reportedly fall under the category of the app’s political content policy which makes room for ads of this theme. It outlined a few different types of political content and tweets that provided financial support.
They did mention how the news would be publicly announced but it’s yet to be done and this type of deficiency in terms of disclosure means Twitter might not be revealing the truth behind a lot of its data which makes it hard to see what is really going on the platform.
It’s also hard to determine which groups are swaying voters before the elections in 2024. This is a clear lapse of transparency that prove how it falls short of providing the world with news about whose working their way to influence voters and who is not in the online world.
A lot of different social media firms have disclosed platforms that are imperfect while others are useful. Could this be a disclosure regime? Well, one non-profit watchdog group does not believe so.
As it is, there are actually not a lot of standards out there today that showcase how digital firms should really be disclosing such information to the public. Nevertheless, tech giants like Meta and even Google are maintaining public libraries of various political ads across differnet platforms.
Users must put out requests for data and Twitter has even added more steps to turn such advertising into something that’s more publicized for others to see. Moreover, the removal of such tweets from the firm’s public report makes it more difficult to see what sort of political influence the app really has.
During the start of 2023, we saw Twitter mention how it would resume this kind of political advertising, despite a ban on this in 2019. The ban was reversed after Musk’s takeover.
Twitter is already suffering from many advertisers taking a step back from the platform due to concerns linked to the safety of brands. But it still, put out a new Google Form across its webpage where so many members of the public may ask for information regarding political ads being published on the app.
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