A newly announced "Advertising Transparency Center" will allow people to view every ad currently on Twitter. | Getty Twitter increases ad transparency as Russia investigation intensifies Election and issues-based ads will be subject to an even greater degree of transparency, Twitter said.

As lawmakers weigh stricter rules for online political advertising as part of a probe into Russia's influence on U.S. elections, Twitter announced plans Tuesday to begin divulging more information about all of the advertisements being promoted across its network.

A newly announced "Advertising Transparency Center" will allow people to view every ad currently on Twitter, how long it has been promoted and other content affiliated with the marketing campaign. Users can also see which ads have been targeted to them personally based on their individual data.


The transparency center will launch "in the coming weeks," the company said.

Election and issues-based ads will be subject to an even greater degree of transparency, Twitter said.

Advertising that refers to a specific political candidate or party must disclose the campaign backing the ad and will be marked to indicate the content is political in nature. Political advertisers will also have to publicly reveal the age, gender and geography of the audience they are targeting, how much they spend on a particular ad campaign and how much they have paid for political advertising overall.

Twitter further said new restrictions imposed on political advertisers will limit their options for targeting ads to particular users and "introduce stronger penalties" for those who break the rules. A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the new restrictions and penalties.

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Similar rules could soon be put in place for "issues-based ads," though Twitter said those will take more time to develop.

"There is currently no clear industry definition for Issues-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," Twitter wrote in a blog post.

Lawmakers are ratcheting up the pressure on Twitter, Google and Facebook as the companies discovered that Russia-supported accounts distributed ads and other content in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. Some of those ads were designed to stoke racial or social tensions, rather than endorse a specific candidate.

Companies are eager to show they are making voluntary changes rather than be subject to mandated disclosure rules. Facebook, for example, recently unveiled plans to hire more human workers to review ads that are political in nature.

Already bipartisan teams of lawmakers in the House and Senate have proposed legislation that would require tech companies to disclose more information about political ads sold on their networks. On Tuesday, Democrats behind the Honest Ads Act praised Twitter for its newfound rules while cautioning that the industry's self-regulation efforts will not halt their pursuit of legislation.

"If Twitter is an advocate for this type of transparency and accountability, I look forward to its support of my bipartisan legislation,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in a statement.

A House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing on online political ads this afternoon, and top lawyers for Twitter, Google and Facebook are slated to appear before the House and Senate intelligence committees on Nov. 1.

"We look forward to engaging with Members of Congress and other key stakeholders on these issues as the legislative process continues," Twitter wrote in its blog.