On Friday, Facebook CEO Mark zuckerberg announced that social media website will require all data of political ads to be disclosed as who is paying for the message and for their identity to be verified in a order to cut down outside election interference.
“With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive discourse and prevent interference in these elections,” Zuckerberg posted from an official account on Facebook.
Facebook will take few steps regarding Political ads:
These are some clauses announced by Mark zuckerberg
- First, from now on, every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified. To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location. Any advertiser who doesn’t pass will be prohibited from running political or issue ads.
- The website will label them and advertisers will have to show who paid for them. Initially its starting in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months.
- For more political ads transparency, Facebook has also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. It’s testing this in Canada now and will launch it globally this summer.
- Facebook is also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.
- It will require people who manage large pages to be verified as well. This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way.
These changes have been made accordingly for the upcoming general elections in Pakistan and other countries in order to protect social election campaign from sabotaging.
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“We’re committed to getting this done in time for the critical months before the 2018 elections,” Zuckerberg stated.
“Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online,” Mark Zuckerberg said.