Social media giant Facebook has announced changes to its page management and political advertising guidelines. The changes are applicable to both Facebook and Instagram.
As per the change in policy announced last week, the managers of groups with a “large number of followers” will be subject to more detailed scrutiny including their identity and location to make it harder for people to administer a page using a fake account.
In the same announcement, Facebook also said it has started testing further requirements for what it calls ‘issue ads’ – advertisements that appear to be politically motivated.
“We are committed to ensuring integrity of elections around the world and taken a number of steps to prevent this abuse on our platform, including improving the enforcement and transparency of ads, and enhanced security measures. We are applying what we learned in the US to elections around the world and working with the broader community to identify threats” said the Spokesperson from Facebook.
“For example, during the recent postal survey on marriage equality, we worked closely with local authorities to ensure that ads that were connected with this, that we were aware of, complied with applicable law. We will be doing the same in all future federal elections.” He added.
Only authorised advertisers will be allowed to run political ads, expanding the rule introduced by Facebook in October last year that applied to open political advertising.
These ads will now be clearly labelled in the top left corner as “Political Ad” with “paid for by” information included in the advert. Ads which fail the verification process will be banned from both Facebook and Instagram.
