Microsoft Advertising

Report March 2025

Submitted
Commitment 7
Relevant Signatories commit to put proportionate and appropriate identity verification systems in place for sponsors and providers of advertising services acting on behalf of sponsors placing political or issue ads. Relevant signatories will make sure that labelling and user-facing transparency requirements are met before allowing placement of such ads.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 7.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
No
If yes, list these implementation measures here
Not applicable
Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?
No
If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?
Not applicable 
Measure 7.3
Relevant Signatories will take appropriate action, such as suspensions or other account-level penalties, against political or issue ad sponsors who demonstrably evade verification and transparency requirements via on-platform tactics. Relevant Signatories will develop - or provide via existing tools - functionalities that allow users to flag ads that are not labelled as political.
QRE 7.3.1
Relevant Signatories will report on the tools and processes in place to request a declaration on whether the advertising service requested constitutes political or issue advertising.
As set out in QRE 5.1.1, Microsoft Advertising prohibits ads for election-related content, political candidates, parties, ballot measures and political fundraising globally; similarly, ads aimed at fundraising for political candidates, parties, political action committees (“PACs”), and ballot measures also are barred. All Microsoft and third-party services that rely on Microsoft Advertising to serve advertisements on their platforms benefit from these robustly enforced set of policies. 

Furthermore, Microsoft Advertising’s policies also prohibit certain types of advertisements that might be considered issue-based. More specifically, “advertising that exploits political agendas, sensitive political issues or uses ‘hot button’ political issues or names of prominent politicians is not allowed regardless of whether the advertiser has a political agenda,” and “advertising that exploits sensitive political [or religious] issues for commercial gain or promote extreme political or extreme religious agendas or any known associations with hate, criminal or terrorist activities” is also prohibited. In addition, to comply with local laws in Canada and France, Microsoft Advertising has prohibited advertising content related to debates of general interest linked to an electoral campaign in those jurisdictions.

See here:
Microsoft Advertising - Restricted Content - Political contentand Microsoft Advertising – Restricted Content - Religious Content 
QRE 7.3.2
Relevant Signatories will report on policies in place against political or issue ad sponsors who demonstrably evade verification and transparency requirements on-platform.
Microsoft Advertising does not offer its advertising services to customers or partners that may promote political content.  For example, a political party would be made aware by our customer support team that it cannot run political ads campaigns through our ad network. 

Microsoft Advertising employs dedicated operational support and engineering resources to enforce restrictions on political advertising using a combination of proactive and reactive mechanisms. On the proactive side, Microsoft Advertising has implemented several processes designed to identify and block political ads from showing across its advertising network, including restrictions on certain terms and from certain domains. For example, we compile a list of terms comprised of known political parties, candidates, and ballot measures and block any ads that may be otherwise shown on a search engine search for such terms. On the reactive side, if Microsoft Advertising becomes aware that an ad suspected of violating its policies is being served to our publishers—for instance, because a user flagged that ad to our customer support team—the offending ad is promptly reviewed. If it violates our policies, we will take it down. Users can report advertising that may be in violation of the Microsoft Advertising policies through the publisher-specific reporting form or via this form: Low quality ad submission & escalation - Microsoft Advertising

The above actions apply across all the websites that use Microsoft Advertising to serve ads on their properties, whether owned and operated by Microsoft (like Bing) or third-party websites.