Google transformed the political advertising world with its reversal on targeting

In the most important, even if not the most aggressive, move yet by the tech giants to curtail misinformation shared by political campaigns on their platforms, Google said on Wednesday that it would no longer permit campaigns to micro-target voters with certain ads based on political attributes.

But valuable advertiser options like Customer Match, where campaigns can upload a list of prospective voters emails or phone numbers and then have that matched with their online profiles, will no longer be available to political candidates.

Googles decision, coming a few weeks after Twitter altogether banned political ads on its platform, immediately gins up new pressure on Googles principal competitor in digital advertising: Facebook. The social media giant has said that it, too, is considering changes to its targeting practices, although that message has gotten muddled at times by some of its executives, most recently during an interview with Recodes Peter Kafka at the Code Media conference on Monday.

Facebook has stubbornly refused to bring fact-checking to bear on political ads, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg defending candidates ability to speak freely, even if that means lying in ads. Google and YouTube, too, are willing to let politicians lie in ads, a policy that Google did not change or address in its announcement on Wednesday.

Google did say that it would take new steps to curb misinformation, though, by changing its policies to forbid the presentation of deep fakes and ad spots that are demonstrably false.

Original article