This Week in Social and Digital (Week of December 3)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
This week’s just a collection of quick hits.
News Quick Hits
Google is limiting targeting for political ads. Now, election ads can't be targeted through Google properties based on political affiliation. It will also ban any “doctored” media like deep fakes in advertising. Election ads wil, however, be able to be targeted based on location, age and gender. Google joins Twitter and Snapchat in placing limitations on political advertising.
Facebook is giving advertisers the ability to choose where their ads will be displayed using whitelists. Previously, Facebook only offered the ability to create blocklists, which tend to be broader then whitelists because they entail advertisers choosing where they don’t want to be displayed but open them up to appear anywhere else. Whitelists will allow advertisers to direct which specific properties and content they want their ads to appear alongside. The move is part of a broader effort to address brand safety concerns.
Twitter users can now automatically hide replies to their tweets. Those tweets can be revealed by tapping a grey icon, but the option to hide tweets by default is meant to give tweet creators more control over the conversation. This may be viewed as being beneficial to brands, but brands should still use the feature sparingly when hiding critical replies as they can still be viewed.
Facebook has launched a new photo export tool as part of the open-source Data Transfer Project, which was developed to allow people to move their information across the web. This tool from Facebook allows users move all of their Facebook media over to Google Photos. The Data Transfer Project was established in 2018 and includes Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and others.
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down from their respective positions of CEO and president of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, will take over, while Page and Brin remain on the board.