Facebook has rolled out new rules designed to curb the type of disinformation Russian operatives used to meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
The new rules governing “issue ads,” announced Friday, are aimed at Russia’s Internet trolls and their ilk, which surreptitiously bought ads about topics such as race, gun control and gay rights during the 2016 presidential campaign to try to stir social discord in the United States.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system,” wrote Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a post Friday. “But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads.”
Zuckerberg also offered Facebook’s clearest support yet for pending federal legislation that would require the tech industry to disclose more information about political ads, including who buys them, and retain copies of them for public inspection. “Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act,” Zuckerberg said. “This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.”
Zuckerberg explains what the new rules entail.
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. We will also label them and advertisers will have to show you who paid for them. We're starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months.
For even greater political ads transparency, we have also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. We're testing this in Canada now and we'll launch it globally this summer. We're also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.
Second, we will also 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.
Read Zuckerberg's full post (Facebook)
Facebook’s new rules aim to thwart the kind of ads bought by Russian trolls during the election (WaPo)