Meta Announces New Ads Transparency Tool Following the Elections in Kenya

Following the recent elections in Kenya, Meta has announced a new ads transparency tool for electoral and issue ads.

Meta’s new ads transparency tool for electoral and issue ads launched in the US today. Advertisers placing political ads are now required to verify their identity and location. Once authorized, their ads will appear with a label in News Feed, disclosing who paid for the ad from the advertiser, and be available in a searchable archive for up to seven years. Anyone on Facebook can now access the archive too.

Last fall, as you know, Mark announced a number of steps that we’re taking to protect elections from bad actors on our platform. In March, we gave a broader overview of our efforts so far and promised to provide regular updates on our progress. Today we’re going to talk in detail about one of those updates and then we’ll spend the rest of the time answering your questions.

As a place to start, though, I want to emphasize how seriously we’re taking this issue and the resources we’re dedicating to it. We’ve got a number of new initiatives designed to create a robust approach to protecting election integrity on Facebook and Instagram.

And they’re driven in part by what we’re learned from recent elections in places like Germany, France, Kenya, the United Kingdom and also through collaboration with partners like the Atlantic Council and the Comparative Agendas Project.

Now when it comes to this work, there are five core areas where we’re focused. Those are:

– Combating foreign interference,

– Fighting fake accounts,

– Boosting investments and security,

– Reducing the spread of false news, and

– Increasing ads transparency 

Simply put, we think ads should be transparent; it’s one of the core ads principles that we shared last fall in a post by our Vice President for Ads, Rob Goldman. You should be able to understand who’s showing you ads and you should see what other ads that advertiser is running.

Steve Satterfield, A Director on Facebook’s Policy Team.

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