(Image source from: nbcnews.com)
Facebook brings new measures for more transparency in political advertising on its platform in India.
The implementation comes ahead of General elections in India.
This adds a layer of transparency for Political Ads Policy.
This wide range of the new guidelines will cover ads that reference Political parties, Political figures, elections and ads that advocate for or against legislation.
As part of new guidelines, new political ads on this platform will now come up with ‘Published By’ or ‘Paid for By’ disclaimers as specified by the given advertisers at the time of buying the ad space.
From this users will get a idea of who has paid for that advertisement which they are seeing on their timeline.
Social media platform also says that users will be able to access a searchable Ad Library to find out more about the ads related to politics, including impressions, demographics of who saw the ad,and the money spent on promoting the advert.
It says that the political ads policy will come into effect from february 21.
“It confirms that only advertisers who have completed authorizations and specified disclosures about responsible for any ad, will be allowed to run political ads on the social network in India.”
Facebook says, “We will remove political ads running without a disclaimer in news feed and will place them in the ads library.”
“Our systems won't catch every political ad that runs, so reports from others will be key. If people come across an ad and think it should include a disclaimer, they can tap the three dots at the top right-hand corner of the ad, and select “Report ad.” If we find the ad relates to politics, we'll remove it and add it to the Library, where it will be accessible for seven years,” says Shivnath Thukral, Public Policy Director, India & South Asia, Facebook.
It is also adding more transparency to the ownership of Pages running the political adverts in India.
Social Network says that from this month, users will be able to see the primary country location of the people who manage the Pages which are running or paying for political ads in India. This information will be available in the “Info and Ads” section for the specific page, along with all the ads the Page is currently running.
This is to make more difficult for anyone to administer or operate a Page using a fake or unverified account on the platform.
As a step users who runs Pages with what Facebook describes as “a large audience in India” will need to secure their account with two- factor authentication and confirm their primary country location to be able to continue to post to their Pages.”
This political Ads Policy and other measures comes ahead of crucial lok Sabha elections.
Recently Facebook, WhatsApp and twitter faced a lot of criticism for the fake news and misinformation without verifying, which spread across the social media platforms.
-Sai Kumar
