Google has announced that it will no longer permit political campaigns to target advertising at people based on their supposed political beliefs.
Google has created a new policy that will prohibit political campaigns from using target advertising on people based on their political leanings as well as matching their own database of prospective voters against Google's user base, to target individuals across platforms such as YouTube and Google search.
According to Google, it will be implementing the policy in the United Kingdom (UK) "within a week" while other regions will follow later. Despite the restrictions, political campaigns may still be able to target based on age, gender and location.
Google also stated that it would address obviously misleading statements in ads, taking a different stand from Facebook. According to Facebook's chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg, the firm will not fact-check advertising from political candidates or campaigns on its platform.
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, announced on that the company will stop accepting political ads. In a tweet, Jack Dorsey discussed the company’s stand on political ads, writing: "We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought."
Google's new policy somewhat places it in the middle of the spectrum, as it suggests a hands-off approach, only acting on the most obvious misinformation.
Scott Spencer, Google’s head of product management for Google Ads, wrote in a blog post: “We recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation. So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited - but we will continue to do so for clear violations.”
"It will take some time to implement these changes. 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, 2020," Spencer added.
