Facebook said on Friday it would roll out a new feature designed to make political advertising more transparent in time for a key German regional election, as it seeks to restore trust after a massive data breach. The social network has been at the centre of controversy over suspected Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. presidential election via its platform, and the leak of personal data of 87 million users to a political consultancy that advised Donald Trump’s team. On Friday, a German data privacy regulator said it was opening non-compliance procedures against Facebook in relation to the data leak to the consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, that was exposed a month ago.
Seeking to contain the fallout, Facebook has said it would only allow authorised advertisers to run electoral ads and that these should be clearly labelled. It is also trying out a new ‘view ads’ feature that allows users to search the ads that are running on an advertiser’s Facebook page.
“We will be able to roll out the first phase of our transparency efforts — the view ads tool — this summer in time for the Bavarian state elections,” Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, told German lawmakers at a closed-door hearing in Berlin, according to his prepared remarks.
Full Article: Facebook to roll out political ad feature in time for German state vote.