Elections & Democracy, Free Expression, Privacy & Data
Report — Rules of the Road: Political Advertising on Social Media in the 2024 U.S. Election
Report also authored by Laura Kurek, CDT Intern, Ph.D. student, University of Michigan School of Information. CDT interns Ebie Quinn (Harvard Law School) and Saanvi Arora (UC Berkeley) also contributed research.
In 2006, just two years after Facebook was founded, some college students running in student body elections reached out to the young company with an idea: what if it were possible to target campaign messages to college students on Facebook at a specific university using paid ads on the platform? Just like that, the era of online political advertising was born.
For a decade, online political advertising quietly gained traction with large and small political campaigns alike. Political campaigns now invest heavily in their online presence and have a clear interest in growing their audience – and targeting constituents – using paid advertising.
The governance of social media platforms, including online political advertising, has become more contentious over time. Starting in 2016, high-impact geopolitical events tied to strategically targeted online political advertisements led Congress and intelligence agencies to investigate the tools and services that technology companies were offering political advertisers. Social media companies have since faced consistent pressure to account for their content moderation policies and practices and for how they collect and process user data, especially to target ads. Concerns about COVID-19 misinformation and the emergence of content moderation as a “culture war” talking point have made this issue even more salient.
In response, social media companies’ political advertising policies have continued to evolve. Companies have responded by restricting the types of personal characteristics that advertisers can use to target political ads, implementing residency and authenticity requirements to prevent foreign interference, and creating advertising databases containing all political ads served on their platforms to provide greater transparency into the paid content users see. Developments like the insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the onset of the Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars, and the emergence of generative AI have further shaped platform political advertising policies. In parallel, legislators and regulatory agencies around the world have sought to regulate online political advertising, though federal legislators in the U.S. have failed to agree on an approach.
This brief seeks to demystify how social media platforms define and govern online political advertising in the United States, specifically focusing on the ways in which policies at seven different companies—Google’s YouTube, Meta, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Reddit, Snap, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter)—have changed in the last four years. We review each company’s policies in depth, identifying 13 different components of these policies, and highlight areas where policies have changed since 2020 and 2022. We then compare these policies and isolate major trends across the industry.
