Google Follows Facebook And Twitter With Political Ad Transparency Programme

Ahead of India’s general election, which will take place in the coming months, Google has followed the example of Facebook and Twitter in promising greater transparency about the people behind political advertising. According to a report, the company said it will provide details of advertisers as well as the money spent on such ads. … “Simply put, all these ad networks weren’t designed to be transparent,” Damon McCoy, a professor of computer science and engineering at NYU [Tandon School of Engineering] whose team analysed ads with political content between May and July 2018, told Politico. “They’ve having to do a lot of jury-rigging of their ad networks to make everything transparent.”