Facebook Just Unveiled Its Plan To Make Political Ads More Transparent

The known Russian troll factory spent more than $100,000 to buy the ads before and after the 2016 election. A portion of the ads were targeted by interest or geography, meaning that only the people who fit the ad parameters could see them in their News Feed.

After initially keeping them private, Facebook recently handed over the ads over to congressional investigators. And today it announced the first details of how it plans to change the way political sponsored posts will be shown in the News Feed, and the information they will disclose.

This starts rolling out in Canada next month, and will eventually move to the US and other markets. This general ads page will only show current campaigns. But a Facebook executive said the company plans to build an archive for election ads.

"However, when we expand to the United States we plan to begin building an archive of federal-election related ads so that we can show both current and historical federal-election related ads," wrote Rob Goldman, Facebook's VP of Ads, in a blog post provided to BuzzFeed News in advance.

The post said that Facebook's efforts to change political sponsored posts will begin in the US for the 2018 federal election cycle. It will then be rolled out in other countries. The election ad archive will be collected into four year cycles.

Facebook also said it will use the Facebook View Ads page to display any ads that the same account purchases on Instagram or Messenger.

One big question is how Facebook will determine what is and isn't a political ad.

"As part of the documentation process, advertisers may be required to identify that they are running election-related advertising and verify both their entity and location," Goldman wrote.

After a page is verified as a political advertiser, its ads will show the additional information about who they are, and their ads will go into a database of all election ads for that election. Facebook will also enable people to search and see how much money is being spent by the advertiser, the number of ad impressions being generated, and information about how ads were targeted.

As for pages that try to avoid being part of the political ads program and tracking, Facebook is planning to track them down.

"For political advertisers that do not proactively disclose themselves, we are building machine learning tools that will help us find them and require them to verify their identity," Goldman wrote.