There must be something in the water. Recently Facebook announced enhanced ad transparency tools, now Twitter is following suit.

Nothing to see here…

Dubbed the Ads Transparency Centre, the tool allows individual users to search for any advertiser on Twitter. Searches will yield information on all ads running across the platform, including Promoted-only Tweets, as well as ads that were suspended, and why.

Political ads will also feature a badge identifying them as such, and search options here become more robust.

This means users can access details of organisations paying for a campaign, their ad targeting demographics, and whether the campaign was endorsed by the candidate.

Clean and lean

Ads Transparency Centre is been launched ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, but has ramifications for all brands advertising on Twitter, and indeed on social.

Big players Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft have joined Twitter in promising to create a shared database of accounts and users linked to extremist and offensive content, meaning the next election cycle could be a more civil affair. Or at least offensive material is more difficult to circulate. Stranger things have happened.