The first measure from now on deals with any advertiser who wants to launch political advertising. He must be checked and take actions to verify his identity and location. If he is not approved, he will not be allowed to publish. This type of advertising will also be taxed and the advertiser will have to indicate what is the source of funding.
With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive discourse and prevent interference in these elections”
said Mark Zuckerberg in his profile.
The second measure refers to confirming the identity of people managing pages with a large number of followers. The aim is to cross fake profiles and the spreading of false information. The company will therefore recruit thousands of new staff to work intensively before the world’s key elections in 2018.
“After we have found out about the Russian interference in the 2016 elections, we have successfully developed new instruments in regard to the elections in France and Germany, as well as in the US State of Alabama, which allowed us to remove tens of thousands of fake profiles, some of which belonged to Russian media.
These new rules will be introduced initially in the US. In the coming months the rest of the world will follow. For more transparency, Facebook tries a new tool in Canada that will allow the users to verify and trace all advertisements uploaded to a relevant page. Facebook says it works with external organizations to draw up a list of important and controversial topics and it will use the workforce of thousands of additional staff to implement the new measures in regard to the parliamentary elections in November 2018.
Facebook is often criticized for its sloppy data protection policy unlike Twitter, for example, where a flags for false news has been successfully tested last summer. The idea there is to have a drop menu option through which the user can insert a flag on a post and categorize it like a fake news. In its current form, it is intended not only to report and stop the proliferation of fake news, but also to reduce the abuse against consumers, such as women and minorities.
The nature of social networks provides the opportunity to expand the sharing of disinformation and therefore there must be similar tools to control shared content.
