The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg gave another official announcement that Facebook will require all political ads on its platform to clearly mention who is paying for the message, and the identity to be verified of the person posting the ad, “in a bid to curb outside election interference”. Facebook vows to help Pakistan in upcoming elections of 2018, which comes as an important development in the face of general elections.
Facebook will be taking major steps in making its security and privacy stronger for the upcoming elections in various countries:
- It will label the advertiser’s name and advertisers will have to show who paid for them. Initially, it’s starting in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months.
- From now on every advertiser wanting to run political or issue ads will need to verify his/her account. To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location. And any advertiser who doesn’t pass this verification will be prohibited from running political or issue ads.
- Facebook is also in works of making a searchable archive of past political ads.
- For even more transparency in political ads, Facebook has also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is currently running. The company is beta testing this in Canada now and will launch it globally later on.
- This security update will also require people who manage large pages to be verified. This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts. This way content can be monitored properly.
The CEO confirmed that in order to require verification for all of these pages and advertisers, Facebook will hire more human resource. Mark said that,
“We’re committed to getting this done in time for the critical months before the 2018 elections.”
This announcement just came ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before the US Congress, which will be next week, to answer questions about the breach of personal data on 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica that was working on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
