On Tuesday, the company announced a series of reforms aimed at disclosing more information about its ads.
This new policy followed reports that social media tools were used by groups linked to Russia in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election and is a good first step towards cleaning up Twitter.
And while these moves may indeed be a necessary step in the right direction, they alone will not stop the misinformation that seems to thrive on Twitter.
Furthermore, Twitter's policies are just that: policies. The company could, at any time, roll back these changes. And that's a problem. Preventing events like the one above from happening again will require both better anti-exploitation measures and some form of advertising regulation.
Democratic Vice President Adam Schiff said on Twitter:
“Advertising transparency is not a solution to the development of bots that amplify false or misleading content or to the successful efforts of online trolls to promote divisive messages,” the statement said.
Twitter has promised to launch what it calls a “Transparency Center” that will try to bring transparency to ads running on the platform.
It will show “all ads currently running on Twitter,” the company said, as well as how long they’ve been running, the “ad copy associated with those campaigns,” and which ads are targeted to you.
Taking it a step further, Twitter will also mark which ads it considers to be in some form of “electioneering.” And what does that mean?
“Election ads are those that refer to a clearly identified candidate (or party associated with that candidate) for any elected office,” Twitter explains. “To be clear, when you see or engage with a campaign ad, we will now require election advertisers to identify their campaigns as such. We will also change the look and feel of these ads and include a visual political ad indicator.
But while the steps announced today are important, they are not enough. Twitter has repeatedly promised to improve on countless fronts — from targeted abuse to proliferating bots — and yet in the platform’s 11 years, these problems have only gotten worse. When it comes to the documented misuse of the advertising platform for political purposes, it’s long past time for so-called disclosure backed by the force of law. A Transparency Center, while nice to have, simply isn’t going to fix the situation.
