Reddit wants users to engage more with political ads and it’s changing its political advertising policy to reflect this, the site announced today.
From today, all political advertisers will be required to work directly with the Reddit Sales team and leave comments switched on for the first 24 hours of any campaign. This will give users a place to air their thoughts and concerns about any given campaign – and Reddit is encouraging advertisers to respond to them.
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The website has also launched a subreddit dedicated to political ad transparency. R/RedditPoliticalAds will host an up-to-date list of all political ad campaigns active on Reddit dating back to January 2019. The list will include information on the individual advertiser, their targeting, impressions and how much they splashed out on that particular campaign.
“We hope this update will give you a chance to engage directly and transparently with political advertisers around important political issues, and provide a line of sight into the campaigns and political organizations seeking your attention”, wrote Reddit in the announcement.
“By requiring political advertisers to work closely with the Reddit Sales team, ensuring comments remain enabled for 24 hours, and establishing a political ads transparency subreddit, we believe we can better serve the Reddit ecosystem by spurring important conversation, enabling our users to provide their own feedback on political ads, and better protecting the community from inappropriate political ads, bad actors, and misinformation”.
Reddit’s advertising policy had already banned deceptive, untrue and misleading advertising – and political advertisers were no exception to this rule. The website manually reviews every ad before it goes live and only allows advertisements from candidates based in the US and only at a federal level. So, if you’re browsing from the UK you might not have even realised Reddit was running political ad campaigns.
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With this latest update, Reddit hopes to bring another layer of transparency and engagement to the online community.
You can read Reddit’s full, updated political advertising policy beneath this latest announcement and subscribe to r/RedditPoliticalAds to stay up to date about Reddit’s latest political ad campaigns.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.