Twitter's halted the promotion of a tweet posted by a Vision New Zealand political candidate.
While users can still post political content, the social media giant announced late last year it was banning all political advertising on its platform.
The company’s policy defines this as “content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome.”
However, 1 NEWS has seen a tweet by George Ngatai, who is running for the Takanini electorate, promoted on the platform as recently as this morning.
It shows Mr Ngatai participating in a march down Queen Street, and includes imagery of his campaign vehicle which features the slogan “George Ngatai for Takanini”.
When contacted by 1 NEWS, a spokeswoman for Vision New Zealand claimed he never paid to advertise the tweet.
Despite this, it appeared on the feed of a user who wasn’t following him, and was clearly labelled as “promoted”.
"Twitter globally prohibits the promotion of political content. We have made this decision based on our belief that political message reach should be earned, not bought," a Twitter spokesperson told 1 NEWS.
"Any attempt to increase the reach of political content through something like promoted Tweets would fall under our political advertising ban and not be allowed on the service.We have halted the promotion of the flagged Tweet immediately per our Political Content policy after it was reported."
It comes as both Facebook and Google take steps to increase transparency around election advertising in the run up to this year’s election.
SHARE ME