Facebook takes ‘major steps’ ahead of 2018 elections in Pakistan

Taking to Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that the social networking giant would only allow verified advertisers as well as people to run the political campaigns of various parties in a bid to support positive discourse and prevent interference ahead of the 2018 general elections in Pakistan.

Zuckerberg said, “With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive discourse and prevent interference in these elections.”

The two major steps include:

Every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified

1. People who manage large pages will also be required to be verified.

The Facebook founder acknowledged “Russian interference in the 2016 US election”. He stated that the company successfully deployed new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools leading up to the polls in 2017 in France, Germany, and Alabama Senate special elections that “removed tens of thousands of fake accounts”.

All changes made by Facebook were listed as:

• Every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified. To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location. Any advertiser who doesn’t pass will be prohibited from running political or issue ads. Facebook will also label them and advertisers will have to show you who paid for them. Facebook is starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months.
• For even greater political ads transparency, Facebook has also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. Facebook is testing this in Canada now and Facebook will launch it globally this summer. Facebook is also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.
• Second, Facebook will also require people who manage large pages to be verified. This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way.
• In order to require verification for all of these pages and advertisers, Facebook will hire thousands of more people. Facebook said it is committed to getting this done in time for the critical months before the 2018 elections.