Six months after acknowledging it had run advertisements purchased by a Russian influence operation during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Facebook launched new political ad labels in the US disclosing who paid for them.
Also starting Thursday on Facebook and Instagram, users will be able to search an archive of election and political issue ads in the US for all the political ads by a given candidate or organization. The archive will also allow users to see limited demographic information – age, gender and location – about the audience who saw the ad.
The new labeling and archive are the latest from a list of promises the company made in October to come to fruition. In April, the company began requiring US political advertisers to verify their identity and residency in the US.
The changes will set “a new standard for transparency in digital advertising”, said Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management.
The company will be hiring 3,000 to 4,000 people to enforce the rules on political ads, he said, in addition to relying on machine learning tools.
The ad archive, which began recording advertisements on 7 May and will retain records for up to seven years, will stymie “dark advertising” on Facebook – a practice whereby ads were visible only to those who were targeted by them.
Such transparency was greatly desired by journalists, researchers, and election watchdogs. It is now easy to learn, for example, that as of this publication, Donald Trump’s personal Facebook page was running 21 different ad campaigns, and that it has run 4,418 ads since 7 May.
“These changes won’t fix everything, 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,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a Facebook post. “I hope they’ll also raise the bar for all political advertising online.”
Facebook also revealed on Thursday how it plans to define “issue ads” that are subject to its internal regulations but do not explicitly advocate for an election result. The company worked with a non-partisan organization to come up with a list of 20 “national issues of public importance”: abortion, budget, civil rights, crime, economy, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, government reform, guns, health, immigration, infrastructure, military, poverty, social security, taxes, terrorism and values.
The company will still have to distinguish between ads addressing those issues that are trying to influence policy and those that are not, explained Katie Harbath, Facebook’s director of global politics and government outreach.
An ad advocating for changes to tax policy would require a disclosure, she said, but an ad for a “wealth management app” would not.
