Election:
With significant elections coming up in the US, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, India and more countries in the next year. One of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive speech and prevent thrusting in these elections.
After we identified Russian thrusting in the 2016 US elections. We successfully deployed new AI tools leading up to the 2017 German, French, and Alabama Senate special elections that deleted tens of thousands of fake accounts. Before this week, we took down a big network of Russian fake accounts that included a Russian news organization.
Two more big steps:
First, from now on, each advertiser who wants to run political or problem ads will require being verified. To find verified, advertisers will require confirming their identity and area. Any advertiser who does not pass will be illegal from running political or problem ads. We will also label them and advertisers will have to display you who paid for them. We are starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the worldwide in the next months.
For even bigger political ads clearness, we have also constructed a tool that lets anyone watch all of the ads a page is running. We are testing this in Canada now and we’ll launch it worldwide this summer. We’re also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.
Second, we will also need people who handle big pages to be verified as well. This will make it harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and expansion wrong information or divisive content that pathway.
In order to need verification for all of these pages and advertisers. We will hire thousands of more people. We are committed to getting this done in time for the ticklish months before the 2018 elections.
Conclusion:
These steps by themselves won’t close all people trying to game the method. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election. And use fake pages and accounts to run ads. Election thrusting is a problem that’s larger than any one stage. And that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help increase the bar for all political advertising online.
