• Advertisers will not be able to target customers based on their political affiliations
• Restrictions to be levied in the U.K. by the end of the year ahead of its general elections

U.S. based multinational technology company Google reportedly announced on Wednesday that in the coming months it may begin restricting the abilities of political advertisers to target their messaging.

According to a statement published by Scott Spenser, Vice President, Product Management and Advertising at Google, the company is focusing on imposing a ban on political advertisers from targeting the customers based on their political associations and public voter record.

However, the advertisers can still target the voters based on gender, age and zip code but specific location targeting will be prohibited. Relative advertising such as serving ads to people reading or viewing a story regarding economy will be allowed, he further added.

Additionally, he also mentioned, owing to the recent concerns and debates regarding political advertising and with the significance of shared trust in the democratic process, the company aims at enhancing the confidence of the voters with respect to the political ads they may witness on their platform.

For the record, in October 2019, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter announced through a tweet threat that the company will ban all political advertisements on November 22. On Friday, the company published additional guidelines regarding how constraining cause-based advertisers such as climate change and pro-choice advocacy groups could target the ads. 

The new restrictive policy by Google replicates Twitter’s policy in various ways. The change is expected to have a severe and immediate effect on the advertisement network owing to the vast scale of Google’s ad system as compared to Twitter. Since June 2018, the company has run over USD 127 million in political ads in the U.S.  

The changes are expected to be executed across the United Kingdom ahead of its general election by the end of the year. Globally the policies will be imposed by the 6 January 2020.  
 

Source Credits: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20975054/google-advertising-political-rules-twitter-ban-election-uk-general-2020