Reddit is making some big changes to the way it handles political adverts.
On Monday, the social news giant shared an announcement outlining the new steps it's taking to increase transparency on its platform.
The biggest takeaways?
The site has made public the details of all the political ads it has run since Jan. 2019, and has confirmed that all future ads will require comments to be left on for at least 24 hours.
"We are launching a subreddit dedicated to political ads transparency, which will list all political ad campaigns running on Reddit dating back to January 1, 2019," reads the announcement. "In this community, you will find information on the individual advertiser, their targeting, impressions, and spend on a per-campaign basis. 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."
The name of the subreddit is r/RedditPoliticalAds, and a quick skim shows a fair bit of 2020 spending for Bernie Sanders, including several $100 to $1,000 and $1,000 to $50,000 ads targeted at subreddits like r/politics and r/DemocraticSocialism.
In regards to the 24-hour rule, the announcement adds that Reddit will "strongly encourage political advertisers to use this opportunity to engage directly with users in the comments."
When asked why comments were only being left on for 24 hours, and whether advertisers would be able to get around this by ramping up their spend after the initial commenting period had passed, a moderator gave the following response:
You can read Reddit's announcement here in full:
We can only imagine how hectic the comments under these ads are going to be in that first 24-hour period — but it'll be interesting to see how many political advertisers decide to wade in and engage with the Reddit community.
