India’s politicians and political parties don’t seem to be buying ads on Twitter just yet, even as parties are pumping money into Facebook advertising.
As of March 11, Indian content is now visible on Twitter’s Ad Transparency Centre: an archive that displays promoted tweets that have been run over the past week. Quartz searched the archive’s records to see if it showed any ads being run by major politicians and political parties, and could not find a single one. (The archive only permits you to search accounts individually, not to click to see all campaign ads at once. Manual searches of dozens of politicians and political accounts did not yield any results, however.)
The only accounts seen to have run ads related to politics were media organisations, such as the TV channel Times Now and the news aggregation startup Dailyhunt.
Twitter has rolled out the initiative as part of its attempts to boost transparency ahead of India’s upcoming general election. Political campaign ads in the archive, Twitter says, will be accompanied by details about the demographics of audiences they are targeting. And if any promoted tweet is found to have violated Twitter’s rules, the transparency centre will list that it was suspended, and why.
Two days ago, the head of the Election Commission of India said Twitter, along with Google, Facebook and YouTube, has promised to ensure that all political ads on its platform will need to be pre-approved by the poll body’s media certification and monitoring panel.
In order to run political campaign ads, Twitter’s political content policy requires organisations to submit certain identification documents.
“The Transparency Ad Centre along with the Political Content Policy is a welcome step to bringing transparency to promoted and political promoted tweets,” Elonnai Hickock, chief operating officer of the Indian think tank The Centre for Internet and Society, told Quartz. “Going forward, it will be important to see how the system is enforced – identifying, categorising, and tagging content and accounts in violation of this framework.”
The Facebook comparison
While Twitter so far remains a ghost town for political ads, Facebook, which recently rolled out its own ad archive in India, is far from it. Many politics-related pages have spent handsomely on Facebook ads. In Facebook’s ad archive report for the period between February and March 2019, a total of more than Rs 4.1 crore was spent on politics-related advertising. Around 70% of this advertising so far has come from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliated groups.
Favouring Facebook over Twitter seems a rational choice, in most ways. Twitter has less than 35 million users in India, according to statistics portal Statista, while Facebook is thought to have around 300 million.
Twitter is also often thought of as an echo chamber for English-speaking elites – not the grassroots population. Those constituents are generally considered far more reachable through other technological means, including via Facebook, SMS, and WhatsApp.
More translucent than transparent
While it may yet be early to determine the overall usefulness of Twitter’s ad transparency centre, the simple comparison with Facebook’s archive shows several areas in which the microblogging platform could stand to be more transparent.
First, Twitter’s archive only displays ads that have run over the course of the past seven days, while Facebook’s allows users to see all ads that a particular page has run. It is not clear what Twitter’s rationale is for cutting off access to ads after a week passes. Doing so is likely to be a major hindrance to researchers and journalists looking to study how a political actor’s approach to campaigning has changed over months or even years.
The transparency centre also only includes promoted tweets, not in-stream video ads, which are another form of promoted content that can be used in India. “We are working to include other ad formats in the future,” Twitter’s frequently asked question section on the transparency centre reads.
But perhaps the most significant hindrance to genuine research on the transparency centre is the fact that it, unlike Facebook’s ad archive, cannot be searched for specific key terms used in ads. For example, while Facebook’s archive allows you to search for all ads that mention the words “prime minister Narendra Modi”, there is no way to run such a query on Twitter’s archive.
To see what politics-related ads are being run in India, one has to manually search through the ads from relevant accounts. The major issue with this is that, especially when it comes to social media advertising, it is not always political parties’ official accounts that run the most aggressive, or the most worrisome, advertising.
Say, for example, a little-known account – an unverified one, which is not outwardly affiliated with any particular politicians – started to run polarising, religion-related ads that helped a particular party. Twitter’s portal would not provide a simple way of helping a user discover this behaviour – exactly the sort of thing that a transparency resource should do.
This article first appeared on Quartz.
