Ballot box security
Facebook cracks down on political ads ahead of Congress appearance
FACEBOOK has launched a renewed crackdown on foreign attempts to influence elections, promising strict controls on who can run political adverts and manage pages with large followings.
Mark Zuckerberg said the company would force pages with large followings to confirm their identity and location, an attempt to stop foreign agents peddling propaganda to influence votes.
Similar measures will apply to those who buy political or “issue-based” adverts, while the adverts themselves which will carry special labels giving users information about who has purchased them.
Facebook has been threatened with regulation over its advertising empire and the move marks an attempt to ward off government intrusion by Facebook dealing with the problem itself.
It comes days before Mark Zuckerberg is due to give evidence to US politicians following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Mr Zuckerberg has admitted that Russian actors were able to manipulate the social network during the 2016 US election and has said he wanted to prevent the same thing happening in votes this year.
“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,” he said. “These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. 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.” Mr Zuckerberg said enforcing the measures would require Facebook to hire “thousands of more people” in the coming months.
The news comes amid swirling controversy over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw the political consultants use data from Facebook that had been unwittingly harvested from millions of users.
It emerged yesterday that Facebook had called off talks with hospitals after asking for patient medical data, amid concerns surrounding the company’s handling of user data. The health research project for Facebook’s secretive Building 8 department was revealed after Facebook sent a doctor to ask several US hospitals if they would share patient data. The company planned to combine the anonymised medical data with its own to try and improve treatment and care. Facebook admitted it had held talks with the American College of Cardiology and the Stanford University School of Medicine.
“Last month we decided that we should pause these discussions so we can focus on other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people’s data and being clearer with them about how that data is used in our products and services,” a spokesman said.
Yesterday, the Westminster committee investigating Facebook as part of a probe into fake news said it would question Mike Schroepfer, a senior Facebook executive, later this month, as well as Cambridge Analytica bosses and Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge academic whose original app was used to harvest Facebook data.