Facebook reviews its ad policies as prevention for the 2020 elections

Since the 2016 electoral process, the effect that Facebook campaigns could have on the outcome of the vote has been tirelessly discussed. This has resulted in the company losing much of the public's trust.

In addition to this, in recent years it has also gone through scandals regarding the use of its users' data. Consequently, the level of security that users felt when using the social network decreased further.

They are now taking steps to fill both the information security and ad breach gaps. Therefore, this month they have confirmed that they intend to renew their security and authentication policies for political propaganda announcements for the 2020 elections in the United States.

The new measures will begin in September

As we have already mentioned, the company intends to implement the new policies from mid-September. That is why from now on he is making known the requirements that the new authentications will request.

In this way, the media responsible for political propaganda will be able to know the conditions they must meet to have their ads on Facebook. In case this is not fulfilled, the statement issued by Facebook states that the ads will then be frozen or disabled.

All ads will go through an authentication process

In order to comply with the new security measures that are imposed, it will be necessary for entities to go through a verification process. In this way, it can be known that those who carry out the propaganda actually belong officially to a political party and that they are based in the United States.

Officially, two different processes will be developed, one for large parties and one for smaller parties or for independent applicants. In the first case, the interested parties must offer at least one of the following requirements:

• Identification number of the organization registered in the tax payment.
• Identification number of the Federal Electoral Commission.
• Domain of a web page that corresponds to a termination email .gov or .mil.

If these are checked, then the ad will show the phrase Confirmed Organization. On the other hand, if participants cannot meet these requirements for some reason, there is a second authentication process. In this case, the collections to be presented are the following:

• A verifiable phone number, a business email, a physical mailing address and a business website that matches a homonymous email.
• Offer the identification of the administrator of the website.

The new feature will allow users to know who pays for ads

As if that were not enough, now Facebook will also impose the obligation on advertisers to place in their ads who has paid for the ad. Thanks to this, users will have full knowledge of who brings the information to their accounts.

Also, this function will offer much more transparency in the advertisements made. It could even help anomalous situations to be noticed shortly and users themselves can notify Facebook about them to take action on the matter.

Facebook also joins the crusade against the Fake News

With all of the above, we could already believe that this social network has already done everything in its power to limit the influence that its contents could have in the 2020 US elections. However, they have not been left alone there.

In fact, they have also hired a particular team of journalists for the new section of the network, News Tab. With them, they intend to have a research group that allows to purify the contents that are shared on the web and eliminate the proliferation of Fake News and fake accounts.

To put the cherry on this cake, Facebook will also have an eye on ads that work with campaigns that invite people to refrain from voting. With these, as with the Fake News, there will be zero tolerance and will be removed from the page.