Google Inc has made some considerable changes to its algorithm with regard to political advertising. Going forward political ads will be able to target audiences based on usual demographics, however, public records and political affiliations will be restricted and off bounds.
Scott Spencer, the Vice President of Product Management for ads disclosed in a statement that reads below
“We’re making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide,”
Scott Spencer
So things like the customer match tool access will be taken off, a feature that normally helped advertisers target audiences more precisely. In addition, the parent company Alphabet also announced plans to ban all digitally doctored videos and deepfakes.
This comes after Twitter banned all forms of political advertising on its platform and Facebook decided to stay on the fence and not influence people’s choice of what to advertise since it would become cumbersome to decide where the line should be drawn on what is generally acceptable and otherwise thus infringing on their right to speech.
Major tech corporations have faced criticisms from Presidential Candidate, Elizabeth Warren who took to social media to place some erroneous advertisement only to prove how fundamentally distortive the advertisements could portray.