Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter’s Advertising Policy

• Published in: Social media + society Vol. 11; no. 1
• Main Authors: Vekaria, Yash, Shafiq, Zubair, Zannettou, Savvas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2025; Sage Publications Ltd; SAGE Publishing
• Subjects: Advertisers; Advertising; Application programming interface; Archives & records; Audits; Case studies; Compliance; Data collection; Enforcement; Online advertising; Pharmacists; Social media; Social networks; ad policy compliance; ad moderation; social media advertising; platform audit; adult content advertising
• ISSN: 2056-3051; 2056-3051
• DOI: 10.1177/20563051251319675

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 35,000 ads on Twitter with respect to their compliance with 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—of which, 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 different languages. Overall, our findings highlight blindspots 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.