Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Facebook unveils new ‘issue ads’ rules
Facebook soon will require political campaigns, advocacy groups and other entities that purchase ads about hot-button policy debates to disclose more information about themselves, as the social media giant looks to prevent malicious actors from spreading disinformation on its site.
The new rules governing “issue ads,” announced Friday, are aimed at Russia’s Internet trolls and their ilk, which surreptitiously bought ads about contentious 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,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote 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.”
Addressing a separate issue Friday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the company should have conducted an audit after learning that a political consultancy improperly accessed user data nearly three years ago.
Sandberg told NBC’s Today show that at the time, Facebook received legal assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the improperly obtained information on as many as 87 million Facebook users.
“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit, and we’re trying to do that now,” she said.
The audit of Cambridge Analytica is on hold, in deference to an investigation by the United Kingdom.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie had previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends. Zuckerberg said this week that Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while the app, called “This is Your Digital Life,” was collecting data. The company doesn’t have logs going back that far, he said, so it can’t know exactly how many people may have been affected.
The app was created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take the quiz. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook’s loose restrictions — data from their friends, including details that they hadn’t intended to share publicly.
Facebook later limited the data apps can access, but it was too late in this case.
Starting Monday, all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice on their feeds, titled “Protecting Your Information,” with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.
In addition, the 87 million users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a more detailed message informing them of this. Facebook says most of the affected users — more than 70 million — are in the U.S., though there are over 1 million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.
Zuckerberg is set to testify before Congress next week on the company’s privacy practices and the uproar around Cambridge Analytica.
Political advertising could come up at the hearings. One of the lawmakers set to grill Zuckerberg is Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a chief author of the Honest Ads Act.
“This is a positive step by Facebook to take the lead to put in place the transparency requirements called for in the Honest Ads Act, but a patchwork of voluntary measures from tech companies isn’t going to cut it — we need to pass the Honest Ads Act,” she said in a statement, referring to the steps Zuckerberg announced Friday. “The goal of this legislation is to ensure that all major platforms that sell political advertisements are held to the same rules of the road.”
Facebook said it is still working out the details of its plan — including the exact definition of an “issues ad.” In a blog post, the company’s executives said they are consulting third parties to determine the specific topics that would trigger its new disclosure rules, which Facebook said would evolve over time.
Facebook will then require entities that seek to purchase issues-based ads to first verify who they are and their location offline — similar to Facebook’s announcement in October that those who buy ads that explicitly mention the names of political candidates would need to provide verification.
Page administrators and advertisers will be verified by being asked to provide a government-issued identification. To verify addresses, it will mail a postcard with a unique code that the recipient can then enter into Facebook. This is similar to how Airbnb and other services verify addresses.
Beginning this spring — a few months before the 2018 congressional midterm elections — ads about candidates and issues will feature an icon marking them as political. Facebook also said that in June it will offer a searchable index of the ads, including information about the users whom they targeted.
During the 2016 election, the Kremlin-aligned Internet Research Agency posted content, created events and purchased ads on Facebook. Those ads reached about 10 million Facebook users in the United States, the company said in October. Some of them promoted propaganda pages run by the Internet Research Agency. To that end, Facebook also announced Friday that all Facebook pages that have large numbers of followers must now be verified.
In the NBC interview, Sandberg said that if users were able to opt out of being shown ads, “at the highest level, that would be a paid product.” This does not mean the company is planning to let users do this. Zuckerberg has made similar statements in the past but has added that Facebook remains committed to offering a free service paid for by advertising.
Facebook users can opt out of seeing targeted ads, but they can’t shut off ads altogether. Neither can they opt entirely out of Facebook’s data collection.
Since last year, companies such as Google and Twitter also have announced new political-ad-transparency rules. Government regulators, meanwhile, have sought to issue some of their own.
The Federal Election Commission, the country’s campaign-finance watchdog, is seeking public comment on new online-ad-disclosure requirements that would cover candidates and could require more disclaimers on ads that appear in apps like Snapchat. But the election commission’s proposal so far does not address issues ads.
Facebook also faces an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in what’s become its worst privacy crisis in its 14-year history.