Facebook touts compliance with new rules for ads
New tools to foil interference, comply with bill
Facebook will soon be unveiling new tools to track political ads and an advisory board of “prominent Canadians” will be telling the company about big issues it can expect to crop up in the forthcoming election campaign.
The measures will bring the company into compliance with new federal rules designed to stop foreign interference in the election, as Canada tries to avoid its own version of the Russian interference alleged in the 2016 election in the United States.
The new details come just weeks after Google announced it was throwing in the towel and banning political advertising, complaining that the government’s new political advertising rules are too onerous and legally risky to comply with.
Facebook said the government’s rules, set out in bill C-76, were a “difficult undertaking” but it still plans to have its ad library up and running by the end of June.
“If Parliament had wanted us to ban political ads it would have passed a law that required that,” said Kevin Chan, the head of public policy at Facebook Canada
Chan said the internet has allowed for democratization of advertising, which allows smaller players to get involved. “It allows for very affordable ads, so smaller players and individuals can participate in the political discourse. We think that’s a very important part,” said Chan.
When the ad library comes into effect in the coming months, all Facebook users will be able to click on a “paid for by ...” button on any political ad and see information about its performance, a range of the ad’s cost and the amount of people who saw it.
The library will also have demographic information about the people who saw the ad, including age, gender and location. A version of the library already exists in some countries, like Brazil and the United States, but the Canadian version will be customized to comply with the country’s new laws. The ads will be stored in the library for up to seven years.
If Facebook had decided to follow Google’s lead and simply ban the ads, it would have deprived political parties of a huge chunk of the Internet’s advertising space. Just under three-quarters of Canadian digital advertising dollars go to either Google or Facebook, according to the Canadian Media Concentration Project.
Facebook’s eagerness to comply comes in the wake of a widespread public relations crisis after the company was partially blamed for Russian interference in the 2016 election in the United States and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, about the cavalier use of personal information.
In response to Google’s decision earlier in the month, Democratic Institutions
Minister Karina Gould said the company was doing it for “business reasons,” and not necessarily because of the “quality of the laws.”
In order to assure that only Canadians are purchasing political ads during the election, Facebook will be authorizing the people who buy them. During the writ period, the company will be scanning ads for political content and checking them against the registry of authorized users and, if the process hasn’t been completed, the company will boot the ads from the platform.
People from across the political spectrum, like former Halifax NDP MP Megan Leslie and Ray Novak, who was chief of staff to former prime minister Stephen Harper, will also be advising the company on what kind of issues will be up for debate in the upcoming election. That advice will be fed into Facebook’s automated system for analyzing political issue advertising, as it tries to uncover potential interference from outside Canada’s borders.