Facebook Ends 'Dark Posts' -- All Ads Will Be Visible To The Public (seattletimes.com)

"Under pressure in advance of hearings on Russian election interference, Facebook is moving to increase transparency for everyone who sees and buys political advertising on its site," reports the Associated Press. Here's the official announcement from Facebook's "VP of ads" : Starting next month, people will be able to click "View Ads" on a Page and view ads a Page is running on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger -- whether or not the person viewing is in the intended target audience for the ad. All Pages will be part of this effort, and we will require that all ads be associated with a Page as part of the ad creation process... We know how important it is to our community that we get this feature just right -- and so we're first rolling it out in only one country. Testing in one market allows us to learn the various ways an entire population uses the feature at a scale that allows us to learn and iterate... We will start this test in Canada and roll it out to the U.S. by this summer, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November, as well as broadly to all other countries around the same time... During this initial test, we will only show active ads. However, when we expand to the U.S. we plan to begin building an archive of federal-election related ads so that we can show both current and historical federal-election related ads.
Facebook "will verify political ad buyers in federal elections, requiring them to reveal correct names and locations," adds the Associated Press, noting that the effort is "likely meant to head off bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would require social media companies to keep public files of election ads and try to ensure they are not purchased by foreigners."

In addition, Facebook insists that "For political advertisers that do not proactively disclose themselves, we are building machine learning tools that will help us find them and require them to verify their identity."

Comments

All those lost advertiser dollars.

[BrookHarty]

Youtube, Facebook, twitter, and other social media companies are turning down advertising money because of politics.

Conservatives get the bland "purple bed" ads, and conservative groups get ads turned off or demonetized because these corporations are pushing a social idea over an economic one.

How about allowing the NRA, gun accessories, sport fishing, Christian services, ACLJ, right-wing news, etc to sell advertising. These people are who the advertisers really want and will pay extra for. So when I hear that "not advertiser-friendly" we know that's code for "not our kinda of people" and is just more tribalism in the silicon valley mindset.

After a while, these conservative groups will have to start companies to compete against silicon valleys attempt to exclude them. Same goes for customers, after a while. A certain customer base will realize they are being actively targeted or even avoided for political reasons.

So while I think its nice Facebook is trying to have disclosure in advertising, I find it dubious with their history of promoting their social agendas. This is just to appease the public and politicians with the ongoing facebook/Russia advertising investigation.

A reason to click View Ads?

[GrahamJ]

Presumably the reason there wasn’t a View Ads button before is that they know no one would click it. Now that they’ve generated a reason to do so, I wonder if the view will count as a proper ad view - and doubly so for people who were not targeted.

If it counts for targeted people then this could be viewed as a way to increase ad traffic for FB. If it counts for non-targeted people I doubt advertisers would like that very much. Thus the right answer would seem to be to make these views not count.

But then could Pages link to their own View Ads page to get hits they don’t pay for?

*grabs popcorn*