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Global Yahoo Advertising Policies

Political Advertising Process

At Yahoo, we are strong believers in user choice, transparency, and building trust in everything we do. We are committed to being a valued and trusted source of information and understand the importance of truthful political advertising for our users. We outline below the policies, technologies and operating approaches we rely on to support the integrity of political advertising on our platforms.

Yahoo accepts political ads that comply with our ad policies. We define political ads as ads related to a candidate for an elected office or an issue that will appear on an upcoming ballot. They may also include ads intended to raise awareness on certain political or social issues.

Our ad policies prohibit false or misleading claims of any kind. For political ads, Yahoo supports truthful advertising that helps users make informed decisions about candidates and issues. We know, however, that false or misleading claims can, at times, be subtle and difficult for our reviewers to detect. And even when our reviewers suspect falsity, determining the facts may not be straightforward. Despite those challenges, our goal, as reflected in our policy, programs, and technologies, is to avoid running political ads that include false or misleading claims.

We rely on the following 4-pronged approach to support the integrity of political advertising on our platforms.

Policies

  • Our policies require that all advertisers who wish to run political ads through the Yahoo DSP or Yahoo Premium Direct-Sold Channels must be pre-approved by the Yahoo Ad Policy team. We may also accept political ads from third-party exchanges, provided that such exchanges have been pre-approved by the Yahoo Ad Policy team.
  • We continuously review and update our ad policies to ensure alignment with our core principles and promote compliance.

Technology

  • Ads that are running on our platforms are scanned by automated systems for technical compliance and political content. Ads identified as political during the scan may be manually reviewed.

Operational framework

  • Dedicated teams across operations, product, and legal use our technologies and manual review to help ensure appropriate compliance with our policies and enable learning for continuous improvement and innovation.
  • During manual review of ads for ad policy compliance, reviewers look for things like required disclosures about who paid for the ad and whether the ad includes offensive language or images. If a reviewer spots a potentially false claim, it is flagged for escalated review.

Ad feedback

  • We receive feedback from users, employees and publishing partners about political ads. Feedback on political ads receives enhanced scrutiny.