Facebook Rolls Out Plan to Battle Fake Ads With More Disclosure

• April 06 2018
• Sarah Frier, Todd Shields

Facebook Inc. announced that it will require more disclosure for advertisers pushing viewpoints on social issues as co-founder Mark Zuckerberg prepares to face lawmakers angered over data leaks and Russian internet trolls.

Facebook Inc. announced that it will require more disclosure for advertisers pushing viewpoints on social issues as co-founder Mark Zuckerberg prepares to face lawmakers angered over data leaks and Russian internet trolls.

The company said those placing issue ads on Facebook will need to verify their identity and location, the same way as those placing candidate ads. Anyone who doesn’t go through those steps won’t be able to run either type, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

Facebook will hire more people to make the change before the 2018 midterm elections. The company also said it would require managers of popular Facebook pages to have their identity verified.

“This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way,” Zuckerberg said.

In an example distributed by Facebook, a mockup ad with a picture of a candidate carries the words, “Political Ad - Paid for by XYZ State Party Committee."

Earlier: Facebook’s Grip on Political Ads May Defy Stain of Data Leak

Facebook has grown into a colossus in campaign spending, serving up a rich bounty of intimate data that is used to target potential voters from among its online audience of more than 200 million monthly users in the U.S. Campaign spending on Facebook and other digital media will rise to an estimated $600 million this year, compared with about $250 million in 2014, the last midterm election year, according to an estimate by Kantar Media/CMAG.

Zuckerberg’s scheduled for two hearings next week before Congress, where he will be questioned by lawmakers who have expressed dismay at Russian use of Facebook during the 2016 election, and the exposure of data from as many as 87 million users to the Cambridge Analytica firm that worked on President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“There are a lot of questions that Mark Zuckerberg needs to answer and I intend to ask what he is doing to protect the privacy of Americans,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat pushing legislation for more online ad transparency, said in an April 4 news release.

Earlier, Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg engaged in a string of media interviews. Zuckerberg admitted to “a huge mistake” for not assuming greater responsibility to protect against abuses. Sandberg said some advertisers have curtailed spending and acknowledged more work’s needed to reassure wary customers.

Facebook is facing pressure on several fronts in Washington. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the company breached a 2011 consent agreement to safeguard users’ personal information -- a probe that could bring hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

Congress has been examining how Russians used social media platforms to influence the 2016 election, and Klobuchar’s legislation would require disclosure of who’s paying for political ads on social media networks including Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Zuckerberg on Friday said Facebook supports the measure.

“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.”

Proposals at the Federal Election Commission would require online advertisements to carry language identifying sponsors, mimicking requirements for such ads on radio and television.

Shares in the Menlo Park, California-based company have dropped by almost 14 percent since the Cambridge Analytica news broke March 17. An index of tech stocks that gives equal weight to the big five -- Facebook, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. -- has dropped 6 percent over the same period.