Facebook announced on Monday that during the upcoming elections of European Parliament, it will be implementing measures that are developed focusing more transparency of political advertisement.
Aiming prevention of interference in the upcoming elections and making the political advertising more transparent on Facebook, we will launch new helping tools in late March, said Nick Clegg; the company’s newly appointed VP for global affairs and communications, at a Brussels event on Monday.
In order to stop foreign interference with more emphasize on Russia to remain influential by interfering in the European Parliament election scheduled to be held in May this year, social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google are under intense scrutiny of European Commission.
In recent midterm elections in the United States, tools developed by the Facebook were successfully used and now these will also be implemented in the elections in Europe.
Now, Facebook will allow running political ads of only those persons or organizations who will be authorized by the platform and the the ads running on the platform must be accompanied with a disclaimer containing “paid for by” details, Clegg said.
The new rules will also apply to the issue-based ads in which the advertiser, rather pulling the voters towards a particular candidate, tries to influence them on an issue like immigration or healthcare policy as happened in the ahead of Britain’s Brexit referendum when many political ads were not focused on the parties or people but on the issues.
Facebook, in cooperation with a network of academics, will define the issues that will be falling under its issue-based rules and will also archive those ads in library of ads.
The library will be made publically searchable for a time period up to seven years, which will also contain the other information related to specific ads including amount of money spent, number of impressions displayed, details of person paid for the ad, demographics, including age, gender and location, of those who saw those ads, Clegg said.
