As Twitter kicks off its brand safety audit with the MRC, Facebook’s finally starts

Pressure from President Joe Biden, regulators and advertisers is building on tech platforms to do more to mitigate extremist, violent and illegal content on their sites. Now, as Twitter makes moves to reduce problematic content — like temporarily suspending Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account for spreading misleading COVID-19 vaccine information — the company is moving ahead with the next step toward Media Rating Council approval for its approaches to protecting brand safety for advertisers. Meanwhile, following a delay first reported by Digiday, Facebook finally launched its audit on Wednesday.

Twitter has signed a contract with the MRC to begin a “pre-assessment process,” the company announced on July 21. The process is an initial step toward evaluating the platform’s compliance with some of the brand safety standards measured by the industry metrics accreditation body, such as those related to ads served on Twitter’s main timeline, user profiles, search results and in its Amplify pre-roll ad product.

The audit process is a plodding, methodical one. Twitter, in December 2020, said it would prioritize brand safety audits with the MRC in conjunction with its commitments to allow the MRC to assess other ad metrics such as viewability, sophisticated invalid traffic filtration and audience measurement. What’s new is that Twitter and the MRC have agreed in writing to the details of a first phase of that brand safety audit process, during which time the MRC will inspect whether Twitter is ready for the audit from an operational, processing and reporting standpoint and whether the company is OK with the methods and disclosures required as part of the audit.

Twitter needs to go through this pre-assessment stage in part because it is an MRC newbie so-to-speak. “This is a pre-load for services that do not have much previous experience with the accreditation process,” said an MRC spokesperson. 

“We will use the findings of this pre-assessment to identify any areas of improvement and agree on high-level recommendations for remediating any gaps,” said Jonathan Lewis, Twitter’s senior director of product management in a company blog post Wednesday.

‘Platforms are extremely sensitive’

Twitter, Facebook and other digital platforms have been reluctant to provide the level of access to their tech and data processes required for MRC audits. They want to protect intellectual property, data security and privacy — and may worry that competitors could get their hands on the information they supply in their audits. 

“There’s a lot of concern on the part of these platforms about our required level of access,” MRC executive director and CEO George Ivie told Digiday in April. But if the companies seek accreditation, they cannot block the “unfettered access” demanded by the MRC, he said at the time, adding, “These platforms are extremely sensitive.”

Twitter actually committed to an MRC audit of its viewability metrics back in 2018. “We had to pause our MRC accreditation process a few years ago in an effort to focus on rebuilding our ad server,” a Twitter spokesperson told Digiday earlier this year. “Once that was completed, we publicly shared our ongoing commitment to this late last year and have since been working closely with the MRC to align on next steps.”