India Legal: What We Do Know and Don’t about Facebook’s New Political Ad Transparency Initiative
On Thursday, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced several steps to make political ads on the world’s largest social network more transparent. The changes follow Facebook’s acknowledgment earlier this month that $100,000 worth of political ads were placed during the 2016 election cycle by “inauthentic accounts” linked to Russia.
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However, the word “currently” suggests that such disclosure could be fleeting. After all, ads can run on Facebook for as little as a few minutes or a few hours. And since campaigns can run dozens, hundreds or even thousands of variations of a single ad—to test which one gets the best response—it will be interesting to see whether and how they manage to display all those ads on their pages simultaneously.
“It would require a lot of vigilance on the part of users and voters to be on those pages at the exact time” that campaigns posted all of their ads, said Brendan Fischer, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance reform watchdog group.