The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has released a report titled “Rules of the Road: Political Advertising on Social Media in the 2024 U.S. Election.” Authored by Laura Kurek, a CDT intern and Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan School of Information, with contributions from CDT interns Ebie Quinn from Harvard Law School and Saanvi Arora from UC Berkeley, the report delves into the evolution of political advertising on social media platforms.
The concept of online political advertising dates back to 2006 when college students suggested targeting campaign messages to peers using Facebook ads. Over the past decade, this form of advertising has become integral to political campaigns, which now invest heavily in their online presence.
Since 2016, significant geopolitical events have prompted investigations by Congress and intelligence agencies into how technology companies facilitate political advertising. Social media platforms have faced ongoing scrutiny regarding their content moderation policies and data collection practices used for ad targeting. Concerns about misinformation related to COVID-19 and other contentious issues have heightened this scrutiny.
In response, social media companies have adapted their political advertising policies. These adaptations include restricting personal characteristics for ad targeting, enforcing residency and authenticity requirements to prevent foreign interference, and creating databases of all political ads served on their platforms for greater transparency. Events such as the January 6th insurrection, conflicts like those in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, and advancements in generative AI have further influenced these policies.
The report aims to clarify how seven major social media platforms—Google’s YouTube, Meta, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Reddit, Snap, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter)—define and govern online political advertising in the United States. It reviews each company's policies comprehensively over the past four years, identifying 13 policy components and highlighting changes since 2020 and 2022. The report also compares these policies to identify industry trends.
For detailed insights into these findings, readers are encouraged to access the full report.
