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Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter's Advertising Policy

Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou

TL;DR

The paper addresses whether Twitter enforces its adult (sexual) content advertising policy and how compliant non-moderated ads are. It employs a large-scale audit using a 1% Twitter data sample, ad identification from tweet source metadata, Perspective API to flag sexually explicit content, and a two-week rehydration to assess enforcement, complemented by URL-malware analysis via VirusTotal. Findings show that roughly 38% of ads are sexually explicit, with Twitter removing about 63% of these violations, but substantial language-based inconsistencies and non-moderated ads that follow simple templated patterns remain, along with a non-negligible share containing malicious URLs. The work highlights the need for external audits, more consistent, language-aware moderation, and improved provenance and transparency in ad policy enforcement to protect users and strengthen platform governance.

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 thousand ads on Twitter with respect to their compliance to 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, although 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 various languages. Overall, our findings highlight blind spots 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.

Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter's Advertising Policy

TL;DR

The paper addresses whether Twitter enforces its adult (sexual) content advertising policy and how compliant non-moderated ads are. It employs a large-scale audit using a 1% Twitter data sample, ad identification from tweet source metadata, Perspective API to flag sexually explicit content, and a two-week rehydration to assess enforcement, complemented by URL-malware analysis via VirusTotal. Findings show that roughly 38% of ads are sexually explicit, with Twitter removing about 63% of these violations, but substantial language-based inconsistencies and non-moderated ads that follow simple templated patterns remain, along with a non-negligible share containing malicious URLs. The work highlights the need for external audits, more consistent, language-aware moderation, and improved provenance and transparency in ad policy enforcement to protect users and strengthen platform governance.

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 thousand ads on Twitter with respect to their compliance to 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, although 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 various languages. Overall, our findings highlight blind spots 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.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 1 equation, 13 figures)

This paper contains 18 sections, 1 equation, 13 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Ad Transparency on Social Media
  4. Adult Advertising on Social Media
  5. Dataset & Methodology
  6. Data collection
  7. Identifying Ads on Twitter
  8. Identifying Adult Ads
  9. URL Extraction and Classification
  10. Ethical Considerations
  11. Results
  12. RQ1: (In)effectiveness of Twitter's Enforcement
  13. RQ2: Compliance of Non-Moderated Ads with Twitter's Adult Advertising Policies
  14. Discussion
  15. Data Access
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (13)

  • Figure 1: Overview of our methodology.
  • Figure 2: Threshold selection for Perspective API's $sexually\_explicit$ attribute to identify adult ads.
  • Figure 3: Distribution of ads on Twitter over the period of data collection before and after the rehydration (or refresh).
  • Figure 4: Distribution of account creation dates of advertisers whose ads are removed with respect to not removed by Twitter moderation. Solid lines correspond to number of accounts created while dashed line corresponds to its cumulative distribution function (CDF).
  • Figure 5: Language distribution of the violating adult ads
  • ...and 8 more figures