WASHINGTON: Political ads on Facebook will now be required to specify theperson or entity paying for the message, the company’s chief announced in apost onFriday as part of the bid to curb outside election interference,adding that it will verify the payer’s identity as well.

The announcement is pertinent for Pakistan because general elections arescheduled to take place later this year.

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, saidlink>it was among his toppriorities to make “sure we support positive discourse and preventinterference”, especially “with important elections coming up in the US,Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year”.

The popular social media giant, which is currently under fire for enablingmanipulation of its platform in the 2016 US elections, said the new policywould require any messages for candidates or public issues to include thelabel “political ad” with the name of the person or entity paying for it.

Facebook CTO shared a higher number as part of his blog post about thesteps being taken to restrict personal data available to third-party apps

Zuckerberg said his company supports theHonest Ads Act because “electioninterference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform” and that itwould “help raise the bar for all political advertising online”.

“To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity andlocation. Any advertiser who doesn’t pass will be prohibited from runningpolitical or issue ads.

“We will also label them and advertisers will have to show you who paid forthem. We’re starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the worldin the coming months,” Zuckerberg wrote.

The social media platform’s head informed users of a new tool his companyhas built recently “that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running”.

That feature, currently part of a beta test in Canada now, will be inaddition to “a searchable archive of past political ads”.

Another revision will be a prerequisite for Facebook administrators —people who own and run pages on the network and create content — to havetheir personal profiles verified with a blue tick mark by the company.

“This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts,or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way,”the tech executive noted.

“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game thesystem,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page. “But they will make it a lotharder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election anduse fake accounts and pages to run ads.”

Facebook CEO says, ‘Yes — 2018 has important elections across the US,Mexico, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Hungary and many other countries’

“Earlier this week, we took down a large network of Russian fake accountsthat included a Russian news organization,” he said.

To do so, Facebook would “hire thousands of more people”, meaning that thechanges are likely to be implemented this year, according to Zuckerberg,ahead of the US mid-term elections in November.

A separate Facebook statement said the changes would help improve thenetwork’s transparency and accountability since “when you visit a page orsee an ad on Facebook, it should be clear who it’s coming from”.

“We also think it’s important for people to be able to see the other ads apage is running, even if they’re not directed at you. […] Advertisers willbe prohibited from running political ads — electoral or issue-based — untilthey are authorised.”

The announcement comes ahead of Zuckerberg’s appearance before the USCongress, next week, to answer questions about the harvesting of personaldata on 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica working Donald Trump’spresidential campaign.