Amid ongoing backlash against Facebook for the use of its platform for fake news, meddling in election, and for unauthorised access to users’ data, the company has announced new controls for building transparency on its site. Facebook will label all political and issue ads, and include information about who paid for them. It will also mandate verification of identity and location of anyone who wants to run such ads. This announcement takes forward Facebook’s plan to authenticate American political ads, which was announced last October. Now, the measure will be rolled out worldwide for political ads as well as the broader segment of “issue” ads. There are some other additions: Facebook is testing a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. This is being tested in Canada and will be launched globally this summer. It is also creating a searchable archive of past political ads. The company will mandate verification for people who manage large pages in its attempt to make it more difficult for pages to be run using fake accounts or to “grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way”. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that the company will hire many more people to execute the verification. He added, “(these measures) will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads. Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one…
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