Google restricts targeted placement of election advertising
After stopping political ads on Twitter, the Google Group is also limiting the options for targeted placement of election advertising. Individual user groups can now only be targeted according to three characteristics.
These are age, gender and postal code, as Google explained in a blog entry on Thursday night. At the same time, however, it remains possible to place ads for individual search terms such as "business," it said.
In another important step, Google emphasized that false statements in any advertising violate the platform's rules - even when it comes to politics. This also applies to manipulated media such as videos, for example.
Facebook had recently triggered heated discussions in the U.S. with its announcement that it would also leave demonstrably false posts by politicians on the platform so as not to interfere in the political process. Messages from politicians are also not submitted to the online network's independent fact-checking partners.
Earn range
Google went on to say that it expects to intervene in political advertising only in rare cases - "but we will continue to do so in the case of clear violations". Twitter, meanwhile, will no longer allow any political messages to be disseminated as advertising from Thursday. Reach must be earned and not bought, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained.
At Google, the new rules are to be implemented first in the UK - where a new parliament will be elected on December 12 - within a week. They will then apply in the EU by the end of the year and in the rest of the world on January 6, 2020.
The financial service Bloomberg reported that Google will also block the possibility for political ads to upload their own contact lists for targeted addressing of users. This is considered an important tool for companies and also political parties to locate people they already know on the platform. Facebook offers its advertisers a similar function. (SDA)
