San Francisco: Search engine giant Google has put new restrictions on political ads globally from micro-targeting users via election ads based on their political affiliation.
“We’re proud that people around the world use Google to find relevant information about elections and that candidates use Google and search ads to raise small-dollar donations that help fund their campaigns. We’re also committed to a wide range of efforts to help protect campaigns, surface authoritative election news, and protect elections from foreign interference”, Scott Spencer, VP, Product Management, Google Ads said.
“But given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters’ confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. So we’re making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide”, Spencer adds.
.The main formats Google offers political advertisers are Search ads, YouTube ads and display ads. Under the new rules, political advertisers may target their ads only down to the postal code level.
“We’re limiting election ads audience targeting to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level). Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy,” said Spencer.
“It will take some time to implement these changes, and we will begin enforcing the new approach in the UK within a week (ahead of the General Election), in the EU by the end of the year, and in the rest of the world starting on January 6, he added.
Tech giants are under scrutiny over political ads and Twitter has even decided to ban all kinds of political ads on its platform.
Google said it offers election advertising transparency in India, in the EU, and for federal US election ads.
“Starting on December 3, we are expanding the coverage of our election advertising transparency to include US state-level candidates and officeholders, ballot measures, and ads that mention federal or state political parties, so that all of those ads will now be searchable and viewable as well,” Spencer further stated.
Google hopes that these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide regardless of the cost or impact to spending on its platforms.