Facebook to change political ad rules after blowback from media
Social media giant continues to take steps to combat manipulation of its platform in wake of fake news storms
A top Facebook executive has said the company will change its political advertising policy to distinguish between journalism content and political advocacy in the “coming days”.
Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in a blog post that the social-media giant will divide its political ads archive into two sections – one for ads promoting news stories about politics and one for ads promoting political candidates and issues.
The new strategy follows weeks of criticism from publishers who argued that Facebook’s decision to categorise promotion of their news articles as political content would serve to further confuse readers about what is fact and what is opinion.
The announcement is the latest step by the Menlo Park, California-based company to combat manipulation of its platform by bad actors, in the wake of revelations that Russian operatives spread misinformation on the site to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
Under Facebook’s new political transparency rules, which were launched last month, any ads with political content will be placed in an archive that includes the identities of who’s paying for the ads and the demographics of who’s seen the ads for up to seven years.
