Facebook moves to reveal politicians behind mega political ads

As the usual practice when someone buys political ads on TV or other media, they’re required by law to disclose who paid for them, Facebook said it will soon start testing a feature that lets anyone visit any page on Facebook and see what ads that page is currently running.

Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mark Zuckerberg revealed this in a post on his Facebook page on Friday.

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“For political advertisers, we’re working on a tool that will let you search an archive of ads they’ve run in the past. You’ll also be able to see how much an advertiser paid, the type of people who saw the ads and the number of impressions,” he wrote.

Elaborating on the development Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president in charge of ad products, same Friday in a blog post said under the new rules, political advertisers will be required to verify their identities and locations and their posts will include a disclosure which reads “Paid for by”.

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When clicking on the disclosure, users will be able to find out more about the advertisers, Goldman said.

Facebook said, all advertisements, no matter whether they are political or not, will be associated with a page as part of the ad creation process.

The social media giant said users can click “View Ads” and see all of the paid ones, no matter whether they are the intended target audience for the ads.

“Transparency helps everyone, especially for political watchdog groups and reporters, keep advertisers accountable for who they say they are and what they say to different groups,” Goldman wrote.

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The company will start the test in Canada in November and roll it out in the U.S. by next summer, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November, he said, adding that the measures will take effect in all other countries around the same time.

“We’re strengthening our systems to catch anyone trying to break these rules. We’re adding thousands of people to our review teams and will start using machine learning to identify political ads, just like we do with spam. We’re also going to work with other tech companies to share information on the threats we find.

“These changes will make it easier to see what different groups are trying to communicate around elections and will make it harder for anyone to break the rules. This won’t stop all bad actors, but it’s one of many important steps forward and we’ll have more to share soon,” Zuckerberg said.

The move came days before Facebook, along with other tech giants including Google and Twitter, was scheduled to testify in a Congress hearing on Wednesday over how their platforms were allegedly used by Russia or other foreign groups in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

 

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