As India faces elections in a couple of months, Facebook said it will launch transparency tools for electoral ads next month in the country to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on its platform more transparent. Advertisers will need to be authorized to purchase political ads and Facebook Transparency Tools for Electoral Ads in India will give people more information about ads related to politics and issues.
“We will create a publicly searchable library of these ads for up to seven years. The library will include information on the range of the ads’ budget, a number of people they reached and demographics of who saw the ad, including age, gender, location,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Director of Product Management, Civic Engagement at Facebook, said in a FB blog post on Monday.
The Facebook said it is planning to set up two new regional operations centers, focused on election integrity, located in its Dublin and Singapore offices. “This will allow our global teams to better work across regions in the run-up to elections.
“These teams will add a layer of defense against fake news, hate speech and voter suppression, and will work cross-functionally with our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations, legal and other teams,” explained Katie Harbath, Global Politics and Government Outreach Director at Facebook.
The social networking giant said it will continue to expand its third-party fact-checking programme which covers content in 16 languages. “We have rolled out the ability for fact-checkers to review photos and videos in addition to the article link because we know multimedia-based misinformation is making up a greater share of false news,” said Facebook.
