“Disclosing content is not something we do lightly under any circumstances,” Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, said in a blog post. “We are deeply committed to safeguarding user content, regardless of the user’s nationality, and ads are user content. Federal law also places strict limitations on the disclosure of account information. As our biannual transparency reports make clear, we carefully scrutinize all government data requests, from here and abroad, and we push back where they do not adhere to those legal limitations.”
Facebook’s moves today come amid the growing likelihood that Congress will attempt to impose new regulations on the platform, which reaches more than 2 billion people a day around the world. This week, Democrats called for the Federal Election Commission to adopt new rules to block foreign agents from purchasing political ads on social media platforms.Facebook’s internal review of ads linked to the 2016 election will continue, the company said. For months after the election, Facebook said it found no evidence of Russian interference. Then on Sept. 6, the company disclosed that Russia-linked groups had spent about $150,000 on political ads, some of which mentioned candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton by name.
News that Facebook would hand over the ads to Congress was one of a number of major announcements made today by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who laid out a series of steps he said Facebook would take in coming months in an effort to protect the integrity of elections around the globe. The moves came as Facebook is under growing scrutiny by national governments for its role in elections — and as an attack surface that can be exploited by foreign agents to influence public opinion and electoral outcomes.
Other steps Facebook will take include adding disclosures to political advertisements that specify who paid for them, Zuckerberg said in a live broadcast on the platform. The company will also add more than 250 employees in the coming year to work on election integrity initiatives, he said, doubling the existing workforce.
Facebook plans to expand partnership with election commissions around the world, sharing information about known and emerging threats, Zuckerberg said. And it will its knowledge with other companies as part of a joint initiative to thwart bad actors, he said.
In the meantime, Facebook has taken action against thousands of fake accounts in the run-up to the election in Germany this weekend, Zuckerberg said. An initial analysis has not found a Russian effort to influence the campaign similar to the apparent effort in the United States last year, he said.
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