Ahead of EU 2019 elections, Facebook expands its Ad Library to provide advertising transparency in all active ads

On Thursday, Facebook rolled out a new Ad Library to provide more stringent transparency for preventing interference in worldwide elections. Previously, Facebook’s ads were used to try to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. The Ad library will provide information on all active ads running on a Facebook page, including politics or issue ads. A previous version of this library called Ads Archive only included ads related to politics or policy issues. Anyone can explore the Library, with or without a Facebook account.

A day before Facebook’s Ad Library launch, Mozilla with a group of 10 independent researchers published five guidelines that Facebook and Google’s ad transparency APIs should meet in to ensure complete elections protection. These guidelines were shared publicly with European Commissioners Mariya Gabriel, Julian King, Andrus Ansip, and Vera Jourova. The guidelines were also shared with Facebook and Google.

Facebook’s Ad Library, more or less meets the requirements of Mozilla.

However, the API itself and any data collected from the API is not accessible to and shareable with the general public. Only those who have passed Facebook Identity Confirmation process will be allowed to access the API. Also, Mozilla mentioned the availability of advertisements going back 10 years, but Facebook will provide data going back 7 years. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports are downloadable for anyone.

How does Ad Library work?

Ad Library will provide information on who saw the ad, how much money the buyer spent to run it, and the number of impressions it received. This information about ads will be provided for seven years. Users will now be able to search by Page, not just keywords and for Facebook logged in users, past user searches will be saved. People can also report ads from within the ad library.

The Library will include additional information about the Pages where the ads appeared, including:

Page creation date, previous Page merges, and name changes.

Primary country location of people who manage a Page provided it has a large audience or runs ads related to politics or issues in select countries.

Advertiser spend information for ads related to politics or issues where the Ad Library Report is currently available. This includes all-time spend and spends over the last week, which was previously only available in the Ad Library Report.

Starting in mid-May, Facebook says it will update the Ad Library Report on politics- and issues-related ads daily, rather than just weekly or monthly.

The company is also expanding access to the Ad Library API to analyze ads related to politics or issues for a wider group of researchers.

For the EU Parliamentary elections

Ahead of the European Parliamentary election in May 2019, Facebook is also introducing ads transparency tools in the EU. These tools, Facebook said, would have two major goals. “Preventing online advertising from being used for foreign interference, and increasing transparency around all forms of political and issue advertising.”

Per these new tools, EU advertisers will need to be authorized in their country to run ads related to the European Parliamentary election or issues of importance within the EU. The company will be using a combination of automated systems and user reporting to enforce this policy.

They also need to provide a “Paid for by” disclaimer clearly communicating who is responsible for the ad. On clicking the disclaimer, information such as the campaign budget associated with an individual ad, how many people saw it and their age, location, and gender, will also be displayed.

Satvik Shukla, Product Manager at Facebook wrote in a blog post, “We’re committed to creating a new standard of transparency and authenticity for advertising. By the end of June, we’ll roll out transparency tools for political or issue ads around the world.”

Although, Facebook’s battle with ad transparency is still facing troubles on a different end. Yesterday, Facebook was charged with housing discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department alleged that Facebook’s targeted advertising platform violates the Fair Housing Act, “encouraging, enabling, and causing” unlawful discrimination by restricting who can view housing ads. HUD had previously also alerted Twitter and Google last year that it is monitoring their practices for similar violations.

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