Reddit updates political ads transparency policy

Reddit on Monday announced an updated political advertising policy, requiring campaigns to work with the platform’s sales team on ads and requiring political advertisers to open comments the first day an ad is posted.

The platform also launched a new subreddit that will list all political ad campaigns that have run on Reddit since the beginning of 2019.

“In this community, you will find information on the individual advertiser, their targeting, impressions, and spend on a per-campaign basis,” Reddit said in a post announcing the subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds. “We plan to consistently update this subreddit as new political ads run on Reddit, so we can provide transparency into our political advertisers and the conversation their ad(s) inspires.”

President Trump’s reelection campaign did not run any ads during that time, although the president is popular in many spaces on the platform.

Reddit joins Facebook in keeping an up-to-date political ad library easily accessible to the public.

Twitter, on the other hand, has banned political advertising on its platform.