Google transformed the political advertising world with its reversal on targeting

Google is sharply restricting how political candidates can use its advertising tools in a set of policy changes it announced on Wednesday that may transform how elections unfold in the digital arena going forward. In the most important, even if not the most aggressive, move yet by the tech giants to curtail misinformation shared by political campaigns on their platforms, Google said on Wednesday that it would no longer permit campaigns to micro-target voters with certain ads based on political attributes. That move is likely to make political advertising on Google far less effective than it has proven in previous cycles. Campaigns will still be able to target voters by age, gender, and geography across Google products ranging from Search to YouTube. But valuable advertiser options like Customer Match, where campaigns can upload a list of prospective voters’ emails or phone numbers and then have that “matched” with their online profiles, will no longer be available to political candidates. Google informed 2020 campaigns of the change directly on Wednesday.