Every political advert on Facebook will now be required to come from someone who has proved they live in the UK, and carry a disclaimer revealing who paid for it, the site has confirmed. The requirement is the final step of a process started in October to crack down on political “dark adverts” on the social network. Initially, the clampdown was voluntary, with advertisers being offered the option to mark adverts as political. Now, adverts which do not come from registered advertisers will be removed from the site. Those political adverts will also be stored in a public advertising library for seven years after they run, allowing scrutiny of their claims, as well as who they were targeted at and how much was spent on them. Facebook had initially hoped to launch the enforcement two weeks ago, but had to delay it after a series of embarrassing mistakes. These included one set of adverts being allowed to be falsely labelled as “paid for by Cambridge Analytica” and another as “paid for by the Islamic State”. The company says it has made changes to the review process to try and prevent a repeat of such errors. Alongside the new enforcement, Facebook has also announced it will end a similar programme that requires news providers to register when promoting their own stories on the social network. Under the programme, which was first launched in the US this summer, and then introduced to Brazil and the UK later in the year, Facebook had required anyone who paid to promote news stories to register as a political advertiser, and stored those news stories in a separate archive. Now the company says UK news stories from major publishers will no longer need any of the earlier disclosure. If the trial works in the UK, it will be transferred over to the US and Brazil. Since the company first required news providers to register, Facebook’s Rob Leathern said, it had “built more controls to help prevent politically motivated actors [who were] looking to use false news or sensationalism as weapons, and in September, we announced a news indexing process designed to more clearly and consistently identify pages posting news on Facebook”. He added: “In light of these developments, and in an effort to continually learn and improve, we’ll utilise this new process to ensure that ads from news outlets no longer get archived as the index rolls out more broadly. “We want to do all that we can to support journalism, and we know the inclusion of news ads has been problematic for a number of news organisations. We’ll also continue working with publishers, platforms and fact-checkers to increase safeguards and transparency in this area, which should lead to greater accountability for both Facebook and our advertisers.” Although Facebook intends to build its own index of news publishers, it is not “fully rolled out yet”, said Leathern, which means the company is temporarily turning to a series of membership organisations, including the European Broadcasting Union, Independent Press Standards Organisation and Digital Content Next, to define who is and isn’t a news publisher. Some notable digital publishers will not make the cut, however. The Canary, for instance, is a member of none of the organisations Facebook is using to count news publishers. In a statement, Drew Rose, the publisher’s managing director, said: “The Canary is proud to be held to the highest standards of accuracy and ethics by the Impress Standards Code. As the only press regulator to be approved under the post-Leveson framework it is truly independent of the over 100 publications it regulates. “We welcome moves to ensure high-quality journalism is promoted by social media platforms. Impress regulation ensures this high quality and therefore members should be included in Facebook’s whitelist.”
Facebook has completed its clampdown on “dark ads” by requiring every political ad in the UK to come from someone who has proved they live in the country. The ads will also carry a disclaimer revealing the source of funding. When Facebook launched the scheme in seven years, it was voluntary, but now ads which do not come from registered advertisers will be removed. Ads will be kept in a public advertising library for October, allowing them to be examined. A similar scheme to make news providers promoting their own stories register as a political advertiser will end.