Facebook to require verified identities for future political ads
SANFRANCISCO: For months, Facebook’s critics — ranging from Silicon Valley executives to Washington politicians — have been urging the company to do a better job of identifying who is buying political ads and creating pages about hot-button topics on its social media sites.
On Friday, just days before its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is expected to testify before Congress, Facebook said it had started forcing people who want to buy political or “issue” ads to reveal their identities and verify where they are.
Zuckerberg announced the move in a post on Facebook. He said this verification was meant to prevent foreign interference in elections, like the ads and posts from Russian trolls before and after the 2016 presidential election. Zuckerberg added that he supported a Senate bill, the Honest Ads Act, that would bring political advertising on the internet more in line with what is required on broadcast television.
One of the sponsors of the bill, which is still in the committee stage, said that statement was a reversal from what Facebook had earlier indicated.
In the coming months, Facebook will start verifying the identity and location of people who run pages that have large followings, Zuckerberg said.
The company would not specifically say what would make it ask a page’s creator for an identity, though it said the number of followers would be one factor.
Facebook will also soon start clearly labelling political ads and providing more information about them, like who paid for them.
Facebook is under increasing pressure to crack down on misinformation before this fall’s hotly contested midterm elections. And scrutiny of social media has become even more intense since the Justice Department charged 13 Russians and three companies
› These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system
MARK ZUCKERBERG, Facebook CEO
in a February indictment that revealed a sophisticated network designed to subvert the 2016 election and to support the Trump campaign.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system,” Zuckerberg said in his post. “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.”
SUSPENDS CANADIAN FIRM OVER DATA ABUSE
Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended Canadian political consultancy Aggregateiq from its platform after reports that the data firm may have improperly had access to the personal data of Facebook users.
Facebook is under intense pressure after the data of millions of its users ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who once worked at Cambridge Analytica, has said that it worked with Canadian company Aggregateiq.
“In light of recent reports that Aggregateiq may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received FB user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended,” Facebook said.