Facebook, faced with criticism from regulators and government around the world including from its home market of the United States, about fake news and harmful ads, has announced that it is undertaking a number of measures which would allow the company to disclose more data and information about the running advertisements on its platform. The aim is to increase the level of transparency for the users of the platform.
"Today we're making significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook," Rob Leathern, director of Product Management and Emma Rodgers, product marketing director, said in a statement.
The company said that more information about any organization and the ads that the world's largest social media network is currently running would be provided to its users in order to sid in the prevention of abuse on Facebook.
The company said that users "can now see the ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and our partner network, even if those ads aren't shown to you."
For even greater transparency, political and issue related ads have bene put by the company into a special category. This categorization would allow archiving the ads for seven years and within that period the ads would be open for public scrutiny.
Last year, the social media platform was criticized severely for trolling by Russian users who purchased and ran ads that were targeted the American electorate during the campaigning stage of the 2016 Presidential elections. These measures now taken by Facebook is being seen as an antidote to prevent such incidents in the future.
Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on Thursday that compared to what it was before, the latest moves would make the social media platform much more transparent for its users and for scrutiny.
"It will hold us accountable, it will hold advertisers accountable, but it will also give people the ability to find things that maybe shouldn't be up or find things that might be misleading so we can take action," she said.
Following the discovery by the social media platform that almost 500 Russian-affiliated groups had made use of deceptive methods to purchase ads on Facebook during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the company had announced in 2017 that it would disclose the source of every ad that ran on its platform.
And since then, a massive campaign to rid politically-motivated ads that run throughout the social media community was launched by Facebook.
(Source:www.xinhuanet.com)
"Today we're making significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook," Rob Leathern, director of Product Management and Emma Rodgers, product marketing director, said in a statement.
The company said that more information about any organization and the ads that the world's largest social media network is currently running would be provided to its users in order to sid in the prevention of abuse on Facebook.
The company said that users "can now see the ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and our partner network, even if those ads aren't shown to you."
For even greater transparency, political and issue related ads have bene put by the company into a special category. This categorization would allow archiving the ads for seven years and within that period the ads would be open for public scrutiny.
Last year, the social media platform was criticized severely for trolling by Russian users who purchased and ran ads that were targeted the American electorate during the campaigning stage of the 2016 Presidential elections. These measures now taken by Facebook is being seen as an antidote to prevent such incidents in the future.
Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on Thursday that compared to what it was before, the latest moves would make the social media platform much more transparent for its users and for scrutiny.
"It will hold us accountable, it will hold advertisers accountable, but it will also give people the ability to find things that maybe shouldn't be up or find things that might be misleading so we can take action," she said.
Following the discovery by the social media platform that almost 500 Russian-affiliated groups had made use of deceptive methods to purchase ads on Facebook during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the company had announced in 2017 that it would disclose the source of every ad that ran on its platform.
And since then, a massive campaign to rid politically-motivated ads that run throughout the social media community was launched by Facebook.
(Source:www.xinhuanet.com)