Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today outlined the social network’s newest measures to get a handle on its political ads problem and reach “an even higher standard of transparency.” He listed three points the company is implementing to effect this change and plans to put in action next year, through a Facebook post.
The most game-changing proposal is that political advertisers will have to prove their identity and disclose who is financing the ad. Every single ad they publish will be labelled as political — avoiding any confusion for those in the audience. This kind of disclosure is required by law for TV and other media, just as it should be on Facebook.
This will help fight against illegally financed campaigns, as the social network has faced trouble for not being able to catch fake news and advertising over the past year as a result of the 2016 campaign.
Zuckerberg added that all Facebook users will have access to any ads a Page is running, including an archive of all the advertisements run in the past — which stores information about how much they paid, the audience and number of impressions.
The company is planing to use its machine learning algorithms to identify any political ads, as well as increasing the number of members on its review team in order to keep a close eye on this kind of data.
These improvements come as a part of Zuckerberg’s 9 point plan set out earlier this year to tackle politics on Facebook. The results will only be seen after the 2018 mid-term elections, which will be the first time these new measures will be put into action.
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