Reddit’s Intriguing Approach to Political Advertising Transparency

OTI policy analyst Spandana Singh wrote for Slate Future Tense about new changes at Reddit to increase transparency and accountability around political advertising on the platform, highlighting welcome improvements and areas in need of further attention.

Reddit’s new political ads transparency hub, found on a new subreddit titled r/RedditPoliticalAds, includes information on all political ad campaigns that have run on the platform since 2019. The hub provides data on individual advertisers, including what parameters they chose to identify users to target with their ads, how many impressions (or views) the ads received, the time period during which ads were run, and the advertisers’ spending on a per-campaign basis. The data related to targeting parameters includes granular information such as which subreddits, regions, countries, and subreddit-based interest groups advertisers chose to focus on, and which regions and subreddits advertisers excluded in their targeting.

For example, an ad run by Kamala Harris for the People for one day on Jan. 30, 2019, stated “I’m running for President. Together, we’ll build an economy that works for everyone and make health care accessible for all. Add your name to join our campaign.” According to Reddit’s reporting, the advertisement garnered less than 10,000 impressions, it targeted the r/liberal subreddit, it excluded the r/republican and r/conservative subreddits, and was purchased for less than $100.

In addition, Reddit includes data on ads that it approved in error and clearly designates that these ads were erroneously permitted. This granular data is a positive step toward providing accountability around Reddit’s advertising review process.

Reddit has also revamped its broader political ads policies, and will now require advertisers to provide more information to verify their identity. Further, although Reddit already manually reviewed ads for messaging and creative content to ensure they are not “deceptive, untrue, or misleading,” advertisers will now be required to enable comments on their ads for the first 24 hours of their campaign to promote discussion around the content of the ads. This is a unique approach that enables users to engage with advertisers and their content, rather than having no easy way to challenge ad content. However, advertisers can moderate the comments, so an advertiser could theoretically remove comments they don’t want shown under the ad, which could undermine the effectiveness of this feature.