Facebook has faced a lot of criticism over the Russian-backed ads on its platform before, during and after the 2016 US presidential election. This made the company look back at some changes it needs to make to offer better transparency, especially with political ads.
In a detailed blog post, the company has explained that it is creating a new standard of transparency for online political ads. While there are arguments that say why don’t the company rid of these ads from Facebook since is the only sure way of guarding against foreign interference. On the flip side, the arguments were not only about revenue as verifying the advertisers who run them, is going to be costly.
Starting today, all election-related and issue ads on Facebook and Instagram in the US, users will be able to see who’s running the political ad, how much money was spent on it, how widely it was seen, and who the ad reached. This is part of the broader authorization process that lets the company verify that the people running these ads are who they claim to be. Helping people to understand who’s trying to influence their vote will help us better defend against foreign interference and other abuse.
Furthermore, anyone who wants to run a political ad will have to verify their identity and location. Since the company is still testing this feature, it won’t be perfect right away, but you can support it by reporting the ads you see without labels. Mark Zuckerberg says that the top priority remains to make sure that the company helps to prevent any interference and misinformation in elections.
While these changes won’t fix everything, but they will make it a lot harder for anyone to repeat what happened during 2016 elections by using fake accounts and pages to run ads.