Facebook to Launch New Transparency Tools for Electoral Ads in India

You are familiar with the Cambridge Analytica issue, aren’t you? Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg faced a trial in the court, leading to many changes of the platform. For the same reason, they are striving hard to make everyone believe that the privacy breach isn’t possible on Facebook.

As the Loksabha election is nearing, the company wants to play safe here in India. It was during the president election they faced the biggest controversy in the history of the platform. Mark doesn’t want the same in India, where 200 million of his users reside.

Facebook to Introduce New Tools to Prevent Foreign Interference in Electoral Ads

Facebook has widened an array of possibilities to the advertisers. By allowing them to pinpoint the users to get whom they want, the platform became the favorite of business owners. The British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica exploited the very same feature to softly compel people to prefer a specific candidate.

Facebook forecasted the same could happen here in India as well. That’s why the company went on to announce the arrival of new transparency tools for Electoral ads. It will help prevent foreign interferences and make political advertising more transparent.

For advertisers to buy political ads, they have to be authorized. Moreover, Facebook will provide users with more information on ads related to politics and issues.

Samidh Chakrabarti, Director of Product Management, Civic Engagement at Facebook, said in a blog post on Monday that they would create a publicly searchable library of these ads up to seven years. He added that the library would include information of the ranges of the ads’ budget, number of people they reached and demographics of who saw the ad, including age, gender, and location.

Facebook will also open two new regional operation centers focusing on election integrity, located in Dublin and Singapore offices. It will help their global team to work better across regions in the run-up to elections. The team in the new centers will add a new defense layer against fake news, voter suppression, and hate speech.

Moreover, they will collaborate with the company’s data science, engineering, threat intelligence, community, research, and other teams.

Facebook has a face checking programme which covers content in 16 different languages. They will continue expanding the same. It can now review photos and videos along with article links.

Last month, the company officially made it clear that it will show a disclaimer on all political ads in India. Once the tools go live, we will know how it is possible to dig details of such advertisement units. No one can run a political ad in India anymore with a false identity.