How Spotify Is Protecting Election Integrity in 2024
Dustee Jenkins, Chief Public Affairs Officer, Spotify
With billions of people from over 50 countries heading to the polls to cast their vote, 2024 is shaping up to be the largest election year in history. Safeguarding our platform during critically important global events is a top priority for our teams, and we’ve spent years developing and refining our approach. Knowing that election safety is top of mind for many of our creators and users, we wanted to provide further insights into our approach at Spotify.
Our Approach
To help creators understand what they can and cannot do on Spotify, we have Platform Rules that apply to everyone, partnerships with trusted experts who help us identify evolving forms of online abuse, and product interventions to elevate timely and trusted resources and help restrict the distribution of potentially harmful content. Our Platform Rules clearly state that content that attempts to manipulate or interfere with election-related processes is prohibited. When we identify violative content, we take the appropriate action.
When it comes to elections, risks often vary from country to country, and the types of abuse that manifest can be hyper-localized and nuanced. Rather than use the same one-size-fits-all approach to every market, our teams conduct individual risk assessments that consider a variety of indicators, including Spotify’s availability and specific product offerings in a country, historical precedents for online and offline harm during voting periods, and emerging geopolitical factors that may increase on-platform risks.
We monitor these factors on an ongoing basis and use our learnings to inform policy and enforcement guidelines, customize in-product interventions, and determine where we may benefit from additional resourcing and/or third-party inputs. Ultimately, our primary focus is always to reduce risk, allowing our listeners, creators, and advertisers to enjoy our products.
Expert Partnerships
To help us understand the nuance of potential harms around the world, Spotify acquired Kinzen in 2022. This has allowed us to conduct ongoing research in multiple languages and in critical areas like misinformation and hate speech. This research is supported by a pioneering tool called Spotlight designed to identify potential risks quickly within long-form audio content like podcasts.
Additionally, we partner closely with third-party experts to ensure we represent multiple viewpoints when discussing sensitive policy areas. These include our global Spotify Safety Advisory Council and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
In-Product Resources
During key elections, we encourage nonpartisan community engagement by connecting listeners with reliable, local information. These campaigns have driven millions of visits to civic engagement resources, helping users check their voter status, register to vote, or learn more about their local elections, whatever their political affiliation.
We also leverage a combination of algorithmic and human curation to identify content that violates our guidelines and may update our recommendations to curb potentially manipulated or dangerous information.
Political Ads
Spotify accepts political advertisements across music, the Spotify Audience Network, and Originals & Licensed podcasts in certain markets.
Political ads may be placed in the Spotify Audience Network and Spotify’s free, ad-supported service inventory. An account must be eligible for political ads, and the account holder must complete an advertiser identity verification process to proceed. Political ads are unavailable for purchase via our self-serve tool, Spotify Ad Studio.
Additionally, we require that political advertisements clearly disclose the use of any synthetic or manipulated media, including media created or edited with the use of artificial intelligence tools that depict real or realistic-looking people or events. This disclosure must be included in the advertisement and must be clear and conspicuous.
To read more about political ads in the markets where they are offered, and to learn about how to report an ad you believe violates our policies, please review Spotify’s political advertising editorial policies.
