FB retools political ad rules after media blowback
WASHINGTON: A top Facebook Inc. executive said Tuesday the company’s strategy to distinguish between journalism and political content will go into effect in the “coming days.”
Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in an updated blog post that the social-media giant would divide its political ads archive into two sections—one for ads promoting news stories about politics and one for ads promoting political candidates and issues.
The new approach follows weeks of criticism from publishers who argued that Facebook’s decision to categorize promotion of their news articles as political content would serve to further confuse readers about what is fact and what is opinion. The announcement is the latest step by the Menlo Park, Californiabased company to combat manipulation of its platform in the wake of revelations that Russian operatives spread misinformation on the site to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
Under Facebook’s political transparency rules, which were launched last month, any ads with political content will be placed in an archive that includes the identities of who’s paying for the ads and the demographics of who’s seen the ads for as long as seven years.
Advertisers must also go through a verification process establishing their location in the US and their identity. Campbell’s blog post, which was updated on Tuesday, includes photos depicting the archive’s two labels—“promoted News” and “Ads With Political Content.”
For now, Facebook plans to put verified media advertisers who are members of the Local Media Consortium, the Local Media Association, the Local Independent Online News and the National Association of Broadcasters into the separate news section in the archive.