The social media company will now begin labeling all
political and issue ads, and showing who paid for them, and it will require
anyone who wants to run a political or issue ad to verify their identity and
location. This marks an expansion of Facebook's previous plans on this front,
when these measures would have applied only to political ads -- typically
defined as mentioning a specific candidate -- but not to ads that only talk
about hot-button issues without mentioning candidates. Facebook says the new
labeling will appear on ads later this Spring. The ads will be put into a
searchable database, which will be released in June. The database will include
details on how much the ads cost and what kinds of people the advertisers were
targeting. Ads will stay in the database for four years. Facebook is also going
to start verifying the people behind large Pages. To get verified by Facebook,
ad-buyers and Page administrators will have to provide the company with a
government issued ID and a physical mailing address. Facebook will mail them a
letter with a special code to confirm the address. Advertisers will have to
tell Facebook which candidate, organization or business they're representing as
well.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/06/technology/facebook-election-meddling-political-ads-pages/index.html
3 comments:
I think that this is a really smart move that Facebook is making. The internet is becoming a space that many people no longer trust because of privacy concerns. I believe that this change in advertising protocol will make people feel more comfortable when using Facebook and understand how their data is being used in terms of receiving advertising content. I wouldn't be surprised if this lead to an increase in stock value.
After the Cambridge Analytica data breach Facebook's stock has continued to drop to almost 10%. Hopefully these changes to privacy and advertisement transparency will encourage investors to look past this and Facebook's stock will increase. Mark Zuckerberg's testimony this week will also give us an insight on this issue and will hopefully boost investor confidence.
This sort of ad transparency may shine a positive light on Facebook after its resent privacy problems. I agree that people will be more comfortable using Facebook and will appreciate the transparency. Facebook users will be able to have confidence that the ads they are being shown have clear markers as to who sponsored the ads they see while scrolling through Facebook.
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