UPDATED 05:27 EST / JUNE 29 2018

POLICY

Facebook and Twitter get serious about ad transparency

Following a tsunami of criticism over Russian propagandists using social media to foment division in America, both Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. this week launched ad transparency features.

On Thursday, Facebook announced its View Ads program, which will allow people to see every active ad on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Users will be able to see who is behind an ad, how much it cost and who it reached.

On each page users will also be able to see when that page was created and if it had undergone any name changes. If users see anything suspicious, there is an option to flag it.

“The hope of the announcement today, making Facebook much more transparent than it was before, is that it will hold us accountable, it will hold advertisers accountable, but it will also give people the ability to find things that maybe shouldn’t be up or find things that might be misleading so we can take action,” Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at a press event.

“The vast majority of ads on Facebook are run by legitimate organizations — whether it’s a small business looking for new customers, an advocacy group raising money for their cause, or a politician running for office,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, said in a post. “But we’ve seen that bad actors can misuse our products, too.”

At the same time, Twitter launched it own Ads Transparency Center, which will allow users to search for any Twitter account and then see all the ads it has run over the last seven days. Where U.S. political advertisers are concerned, users will be able to see the number of impressions per tweet, how much was spent on the ad, to whom it was targeted and billing information.

You don’t even have to be a Twitter user to see this information because no login is required. Twitter had already announced this was coming, saying in October last year that it would  soon introduce “an industry-leading transparency center that will offer everyone visibility into who is advertising on Twitter, details behind those ads, and tools to share your feedback with us.”

Image: Facebook

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU