Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter’s Advertising Policy

IF 5.5 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI:10.1177/20563051251319675

Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou

{"title":"Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter’s Advertising Policy","authors":"Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou","doi":"10.1177/20563051251319675","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Online platforms have enacted various policies to maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest and concern. In this work, we present a large-scale audit of adult advertising on Twitter (now X), specifically focusing on compliance with its adult (sexual) content advertising policy. Twitter is an interesting case study in that it—uniquely from other social media platforms—allows posting of adult content but prohibits adult content in advertising. We analyze approximately 35,000 ads on Twitter with respect to their compliance with the adult content ad policy through Perspective API and manual annotations. Among other things, we find that nearly 38% of ads violate Twitter’s adult content advertising policy—of which, the platform eventually removed only about 63% of these non-compliant adult ads. We also find inconsistencies in the moderation of such ads across languages, highlighting the need for more reliable and consistent moderation practices across different languages. Overall, our findings highlight blindspots in Twitter’s adult ad policy enforcement for certain languages and countries. Our work underscores the importance of external audits to monitor compliance and improve transparency in online advertising.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":"194 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.5000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Media + Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251319675","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Online platforms have enacted various policies to maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest and concern. In this work, we present a large-scale audit of adult advertising on Twitter (now X), specifically focusing on compliance with its adult (sexual) content advertising policy. Twitter is an interesting case study in that it—uniquely from other social media platforms—allows posting of adult content but prohibits adult content in advertising. We analyze approximately 35,000 ads on Twitter with respect to their compliance with the adult content ad policy through Perspective API and manual annotations. Among other things, we find that nearly 38% of ads violate Twitter’s adult content advertising policy—of which, the platform eventually removed only about 63% of these non-compliant adult ads. We also find inconsistencies in the moderation of such ads across languages, highlighting the need for more reliable and consistent moderation practices across different languages. Overall, our findings highlight blindspots in Twitter’s adult ad policy enforcement for certain languages and countries. Our work underscores the importance of external audits to monitor compliance and improve transparency in online advertising.

查看原文本刊更多论文

审核Twitter广告政策的合规性和执行情况

网络平台制定了各种政策，以维护一个安全可信的广告环境。然而，这些政策得到遵守和执行的程度仍然是一个令人感兴趣和关切的问题。在这项工作中，我们对Twitter（现在是X）上的成人广告进行了大规模审计，特别关注其成人（性）内容广告政策的遵守情况。Twitter是一个有趣的案例研究，因为它与其他社交媒体平台不同，它允许发布成人内容，但禁止在广告中出现成人内容。我们通过Perspective API和手动注释分析了Twitter上大约35,000个广告是否符合成人内容广告政策。除此之外，我们发现近38%的广告违反了Twitter的成人内容广告政策——其中，该平台最终只删除了约63%的不合规成人广告。我们还发现，不同语言对此类广告的审核存在不一致之处，这突显了在不同语言之间建立更可靠、更一致的审核实践的必要性。总的来说，我们的发现突出了Twitter在某些语言和国家的成人广告政策执行中的盲点。我们的工作强调了外部审计对监督在线广告的合规性和提高透明度的重要性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

9.20

自引率

3.80%

发文量

111

审稿时长

12 weeks

期刊介绍： Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.