Meta Special Ad Category Requirements

Meta's Special Ad Category Requirements tell advertisers what they must do before running ads in sensitive areas like politics, housing, credit, and financial products. If you run political ads, you must verify your identity, provide organizational information, and accept that your ads will be publicly visible in Meta's Ad Library for seven years. If you are in or targeting the US, Canada, or certain European countries with these types of ads, many of the standard audience-targeting tools — including age and gender filters — will be limited or unavailable to you.

This document establishes Meta's Special Ad Category Requirements, setting out the obligations advertisers must meet to run campaigns in sensitive categories including housing, employment, credit, financial products and services, social issues, elections, and politics. It mandates that advertisers select the appropriate Special Ad Category or face campaign disapproval, restricts or removes age, gender, exclusion, lookalike, and saved audience targeting tools for advertisers based in or reaching the US, Canada, and certain European countries, and requires political advertisers to confirm their identity, provide organizational disclosures, obtain country-level authorization, and submit to a seven-year public Ad Library retention period. Meta reserves the right to reject ads lacking a required category selection and uses independent signals to verify that political and issue-based ads originate from an authorized user in the same country where those ads are served. Advertisers in the EU are prohibited from creating or editing social issue, election, or political ads entirely.

For individuals who see Special Ad Category ads, this document means that political advertisers are required to carry 'Paid for by' disclaimers backed by verified identity and organizational information, and that those ads remain in a public Ad Library for seven years. Advertisers running housing, credit, financial, or political ads in or targeting the US, Canada, and certain European countries are prohibited from using age, gender, exclusion, lookalike, and saved audience targeting against those users, reducing the extent to which such ads can be narrowly directed based on demographic characteristics. Users in the EU will not see newly created or edited social issue, election, or political ads, as Meta prohibits advertisers from creating or editing such ads for EU audiences.