Facebook pushes new rules for political advertising worldwide

Facebook is ramping up its new tightened restrictions on political advertising. 

About a year after the company first introduced its tools to increase “transparency” around political ads in the U.S., Facebook is expanding those rules worldwide.

According to the new policy, advertisers that buy ads related to elections or other political “issues” need to verify their identity with Facebook and disclose who paid for the ad. These ads, and the identity of their purchasers, are then preserved in Facebook’s Ad Library for seven years, so that anyone can see who paid for a particular ad. 

This is part of Facebook’s sweeping effort, following Russia’s activity leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to protect elections from foreign interference. Facebook has already been expanding some of these tools outside of the United States, but is now making them more widely available. The company is also ramping up enforcement of the policies, starting with countries that have significant elections coming up.

“Beginning today, we will systematically detect and review ads in Ukraine and Canada through a combination of automated and human review,” Facebook product manage Sarah Schiff wrote in a statement. 

“In Singapore and Argentina, we will begin enforcement within the next few months. If we are made aware of an ad that is in violation of a law, we will act quickly to remove it. With these tools, regulators are now better positioned to consider how to protect elections with sensible regulations, which they are uniquely suited to do.”

Though Facebook’s political advertising policies have been met with some criticism from groups that believe the rules are overly broad — publishers have complained that ads promoting news stories should be exempt from the requirements — the social network says the rules are meant to combat the type of election interference Russia used, to great effect, in the 2016 presidential election.