Reddit will now publicly track political ad spending on its platform

Reddit is launching a new subreddit that will list all political ad campaigns that have run on the site since January 1st, 2019, the company announced today. The new subreddit can be found at r/RedditPoliticalAds.

“In this community, you will find information on the individual advertiser, their targeting, impressions, and spend on a per-campaign basis,” Reddit said in its announcement post. “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.”

Reddit is also updating its policies for political advertising to require political campaigns to work with Reddit’s sales team on ads and to require political advertisers to leave comments on for the first 24 hours an ad campaign is live. However, advertisers can moderate the comments on the ad posts, according to a Reddit admin, so an advertiser could remove comments they don’t want shown under the ad, in theory.

r/RedditPoliticalAds will only feature ads that actually run on Reddit, the admin said. If ads are mistakenly approved and then removed, information about those ads will remain on the subreddit, but they’ll have a flair attached to their title that says the ad was “Approved in Error.”

Reddit joins Facebook in having a political ad database. Twitter, however, has bowed out entirely from having political ads on the site, announcing in October that it would ban all political ads globally starting in November. “We have made this decision based on our belief that political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Twitter says on its political content policy page.