Facebook Will Bring Political Ad Transparency Tools To India Ahead of 2019 Elections (venturebeat.com)

As India inches closer to its general elections, Facebook announced today that it is bringing transparency to political ads on its platform in the country early next year. From a report: This would make India the fourth market -- after the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K. -- where Facebook offers users a disclaimer on political ads. Facebook began offering users in the U.S. information about the buyer of a political ad as part of a series of changes last year to fight misinformation and foreign meddling in elections. [...] Facebook said Thursday that it will also maintain an online searchable Ad Library, as it has in other markets, which will document all the ads related to politics from a particular advertiser alongside other information such as range of impressions, demographics that saw the ad, and the budget that went behind an individual ad. India, which is Facebook's largest market, could be the biggest test yet for whether the company has learned from its recent mistakes.

Comments

Transparency is the best approach

[SuperKendall]

Rather than blocking ads from ideologies you disagree with, simply illuminating who is paying for ads would help a lot - what would be great is if they not only would say who is paying for a particular ad, but follow the chain of company ownership backwards and report the string of owners than let to the funding for that ad... Facebook has the kind of size and money it would take to accomplish that.

Now THAT would be some transparency! And to my mind bring some degree of redemption to Facebook.

Re:I am tired of hearing about FB

[WillAffleckUW]

You can submit stories that interest you. It's not that hard.