Facebook Started Labeling Political Ads in the US

Facebook will start to label political and issue ads in the US, mainly due to the controversy involved with Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerburg, in his testimony given to the Congress, had admitted that data was shared with Cambridge Analytica which was then used to manipulate US voters. To prevent this from happening in the future, they have decided not to cut off political ads completely from the social networking site, but rather add ‘paid for by’ labels along with the ads in Facebook and Instagram.

The labelling is not just for election purposes but also political issues that involves abortion, guns, immigration or foreign policy. Clicking on the label will take the user to the Archives containing all advertisements (from May ‘18 and onwards) related to that label. The ads will be present in the archive for 7 years, and in this time users can search for ads using keywords or Pages that put them up. It will also show information such as the ad’s budget, the reach, and so on.

Advertisers will have to go through an authorization process. This process is done to extract the identity and location from the advertisers. Those who haven’t gone through the authorisation process will have their ads paused and new advertisers won’t be able to advertise if they do not complete the authorisation process. Facebook plans to ensure ad monitoring using AI and by hiring new ad reviewers (around 4000).

“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,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. Well, you could’ve done this a bit sooner Mr. Zuckerberg and maybe the world wouldn’t have had to go through a disease called Trump. Let’s have a little faith in Zuckerberg, and hope that the next elections will be a fair one.