San Francisco
Facebook is cracking down on efforts to use the leading social network to meddle with elections in the US or elsewhere.
Facebook
chief executive Mark Zuckerberg Thursday announced a series of steps
that would help prevent the manipulation of the social network including
more transparency on political ads appearing on Facebook.
"It
is a new challenge for internet communities to have to deal with nation
states attempting to subvert elections," Zuckerberg said in a live
video presentation streamed on his Facebook page.
"But, we are committed to rising to the occasion."
The
announcement came on Thursday as Zuckerberg said Russia-linked ads on
the huge social network aimed at inflaming tensions around last year's
US presidential election would be given to Congress.
Specific groups
The huge
social network enables any advertiser, including political operatives,
to target specific groups of Facebook users based on demographics,
hobbies, age or other characteristics shared at the social network.
Some
analysts have argued that so-called "dark ads," the contents of which
are not available to the public, could have inflamed tensions and
potentially impacted the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg said the new steps would address these concerns.
"We're going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency," he said.
"Not
only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will
also make it so you can visit an advertiser's page and see the ads
they're currently running to any audience on Facebook."
Facebook
earlier this month agreed to hand over information about the ads from
Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency to special counsel
Robert Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election and on Thursday
decided to turn over the information to congressional investigators.
"We
believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the
information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what
happened in the 2016 election," Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch
said in a blog post.
Questions
An
internal Facebook review showed that Russia-linked fake accounts were
used to buy ads aimed at exacerbating political clashes ahead of and
following the 2016 US presidential election.
Some 470
accounts spent a total of approximately $100,000 between June 2015 to
May 2017 on ads that touted fake or misleading news or drove traffic to
pages with such messages, a Facebook official said.
While
the amount of money involved was relatively small, enough to buy
roughly 3,000 ads, the accounts or pages violated Facebook policies and
were shut down, according to Facebook chief security officer Alex
Stamos.
Most of the ads run by the accounts didn't
directly reference the US presidential election, voting, or particular
candidates but instead appeared focused on "amplifying divisive social
and political messages across the ideological spectrum," according to
Stamos.
A core question in the congressional
investigation is the extent to which online social networks were
manipulated by Russian interests to covertly influence the US election,
according to Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat and the ranking
member of the House permanent select committee on intelligence.
"The
data Facebook will now turn over to the Committee should help us better
understand what happened, beyond the preliminary briefings we already
received," Schiff said in a released statement.
The
committee will also scrutinise how rigorous Facebook's internal
investigation and why it took as long as it did to discover the Russian
sponsored advertisements, according to Schiff.
Schiff
express belief that the committee will want to hear directly from tech
companies including Facebook, Google, and Twitter in open hearings.
Keeping watch
Along
with letting people visit the pages of advertisers to see what kinds of
messages they are aiming at others on platform, Facebook will
strengthen its ad review process, Zuckerberg said.
Facebook
is also ramping up its team devoted to election integrity, and looking
to expand partnerships with elections officials and candidates around
the world.
Facebook also wants to figure out ways that
internet companies can share more information about attempts to
interfere with elections, according to Zuckerberg.
"It
is important that technology companies collaborate on this because it is
almost certain that any actor trying to abuse Facebook will try to
abuse other online platforms too," Zuckerberg said.
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