Twitter Inc. has announced a new “transparency center” for political ads in the wake of growing concerns over how social media platforms can be used to spread misinformation.

“In the coming weeks, we will launch an industry-leading transparency center that will offer everyone visibility into who is advertising on Twitter, details behind those ads, and tools to share your feedback with us,” Bruce Falck, Twitter’s general manager of revenue product and engineering, wrote in a blog post.

The details will include information regarding how long ads have been running, what ads are currently on Twitter, the content and creative of the ads, and also which ads have been targeted to you based on what demographic information Twitter knows about you.

In the case of targeted political ads, Twitter will now let you know a lot more about the source of the ad. This will include details about the organization behind the ad, what it has spent on its current ad campaign as well as on historical campaigns, and who was chosen to target. Such campaigns will also be marked with a promoted political account. If users believe an ad is inappropriate in any way, they will be offered recourse in the form of feedback.

Moreover, all electioneering advertisers will now be expected to identify themselves as such, and there will be more scrutiny concerning who can buy them and to whom they can be targeted. If policies are violated, Twitter said, there will be stricter penalties going forward.

At the moment this won’t affect issue-based ads. So if no political candidate is mentioned but the ad is clearly supporting a political ethos – say, an issue regarding immigration in the U.S. – it won’t come under the same scrutiny.

On the issue of issue-based ads, Falck wrote: “There is currently no clear industry definition for issue-based ads but we will work with our peer companies, other industry leaders, policy makers, and ad partners to clearly define them quickly and integrate them into the new approach mentioned above.”

The move follows last week’s “Honest Ads Act” introduced by Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner. The bill was introduced to curtail the spread of political misinformation or at least provide details concerning who is buying political ads on social media platforms and to ensure foreign entities are not attempting to manipulate political beliefs. Warner said in an interview that talks so far with Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. have also been encouraging.

A good first step, particularly public disclosure of ads info. Online political ads need more transparency & disclosure. We need #HonestAds https://t.co/ewDbd1hTxZ

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) October 24, 2017

The transparency center will launch first in the U.S. but in time will roll out globally.

Image: Twitter