Facebook's difficult task ahead November elections
Facebook does not want to make a mistake again, nor let the government pull its ears because of the political propaganda that can be spread through its network. That is why it has taken serious measures less than three months before the November elections to enforce the rules that regulate political propaganda. The leader of the social networks worldwide is foreseeing the occurrence of another possible Russian collusion to sabotage midterm elections in the United States. According to official sources of the company, they have caught several false pages that try to confuse the electorate. Among the "defensive" mechanisms, it is forcing those who buy spaces to corroborate their identities by receiving messages in email addresses.
After the Cambridge Analytics scandal the company set regulations for online propaganda that is distributed through its systems and paid by politicians from different parts of the world. About 7600 moderators, who operate in more than 40 languages are responsible for analyzing and deciding the ads and if pages or false or not, besides the automated systems that discern the contents are publishable or not.
According to experts of the company, Facebook elaborated a list of "big issues" that will have a more strict control in which around 20 topics are included, among these there are taxes, terrorism, health, poverty and "values", immigration and foreign policy.
The social network wants to avoid that the product of these ads is trying to confuse the voters and even negative publicity against some other candidate. Facebook increases the fact that sometimes the goal of many of these ads is to provoke public debate, promote measures and even the election of one candidate over another.
Thanks to its regulations, Facebook detected a false page registered under the name of Resisters. This website tried to distribute negative propaganda, which was automatically withheld and rejected by Facebook's systems.
After revealing that the Russians financed thousands of fake politicaladvertisements in the 2016 elections, Facebook and other socialnetworks have faced pressure to regulate political announcements.Contrary to television advertising, online ads does not require theidentity of the advertiser to be revealed, hence the difficulty tocatch those who try to undermine and collude in campaigns or political affairs.
However, at least you can avoid that these negative messages areleaked to the network and reach a large number of users.Facebook also created guidelines for advertisers among which are: nameand address, in addition to the data crossing of an automated systemthat analyzes images, texts, audiences and Facebook page to promote.Among the current regulations for political announcements is to labelthem and ask advertisers to let their funders know; a labelwill possess information of where the advertiser comes from and who he or she is.
Mark Zuckenberg is avoiding being called again bygovernmental authorities of the United States and Europe due to thenumerous scandals of which his creation has been guilty of. Recall that afew months ago Facebook was the epicenter of the Cambridge Analyticsscandal, after the leak of more than 80 million userprofiles. Through Facebook, Russian hackers bought false identities tocollude in the elections that ended with the victory of the candidateDonald Trump.
It is no secret to anyone that online advertising generates hugeprofits for technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple.Political propaganda is a segment that has boosted greatly inrecent years and hence it is more common to use it in politicalcampaigns to generate debate and political positions and even to knowthe criteria of the electorate regarding certain political positions.
However, since the Facebook scandal and the Russian collusion, theconsequences in the policy of this type of ads are being revealedone after the other and so far it is not entirely positive.An analysis conducted by ZenithOptimedia in 2015 revealed thatGoogle's advertising revenue on this concept amounted to 50,600million dollars. Currently Forrester Research ensures that Facebookwon 39,900 million dollars, although other companies such as Googleobtained 95,400 million and Amazon 2,500 million dollars last year.