Twitter Inc says it will add labels to election-related advertisements and say who is behind each of them, after a threat of regulation from the US over the lack of disclosure for political spending on social media.
Twitter said in a blog post the company would launch a website so that people could see the identities of the buyers, targeting demographics and total ad spend by election advertisers, as well as information about all ads currently running on Twitter, election-related or otherwise.
Silicon Valley social media firms and the political ads that run on their websites have generally been free of the disclaimers and other regulatory demands that US authorities impose on television, radio and satellite services.
Calls for that to change have grown, however, after Twitter, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google said in recent weeks that Russian operatives used fake names on their platforms to spread divisive messages in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Russia has denied interfering in the election.
Twitter plans to make changes first in the US and then roll them out globally.
Changes would appear within Twitter feeds, where election ads would have a label like "promoted by political account," the company said.
"To make it clear when you are seeing or engaging with an electioneering ad, we will now require that electioneering advertisers identify their campaigns as such," Bruce Falck, Twitter's general manager of revenue product, said in the blog post.
Twitter also said it would limit the targeting options for election ads, although it did not say how, and introduce stronger penalties for election advertisers who violate policies.
