Facebook VP on Policy and Communications 📞 talks about Russian 🇷🇺 ads

Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Policy and Communications, Facebook talked about some important issues today on Facebook's blog, for their new series 'Hard Questions'. He answered questions about the russian ads that were handed over to congress and about how they have tightened restrictions on ad content. Here are excerpts from the interview, which was posted earlier today on Facebook Newsroom.

What was in the ads you shared with Congress? How many people saw them?

Most of the ads appear to focus on divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. A number of them appear to encourage people to follow Pages on these issues. An estimated 10 million people in the US saw the ads.

We were able to approximate the number of unique people (“reach”) who saw at least one of these ads, with our best modeling. About 44% of the ads were seen before the US election on November 8, 2016; 56% were seen after the election.

Why can’t you catch every ad that breaks your rules?

We review millions of ads each week, and about 8 million people report ads to us each day. In the last year alone, we have significantly grown the number of people working on ad review. And in order to do better at catching abuse on our platform, we’re announcing a number of improvements, including: making advertising more transparent, strengthening enforcement against improper ads, tightening restrictions on advertiser content, increasing requirements for authenticity and establishing industry standards and best practices

Weren’t some of these ads paid for in Russian currency? Why didn’t your ad review system notice this and bring the ads to your attention?

Some of the ads were paid for in Russian currency. Currency alone isn’t a good way of identifying suspicious activity, because the overwhelming majority of advertisers who pay in Russian currency, like the overwhelming majority of people who access Facebook from Russia, aren’t doing anything wrong.

If the ads had been purchased by Americans instead of Russians, would they have violated your policies?

We require authenticity regardless of location. If Americans conducted a coordinated, inauthentic operation — as the Russian organization did in this case — we would take their ads down, too. However, many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform.

*Shouldn’t you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?* 
The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate — and advertise — their views in a wide range of countries.

While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so — just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

Some of these ads and other content on Facebook appear to sow division in America and other countries at a time of increasing social unrest. If these ads or content were placed or posted authentically, you would allow many of these. Why?

This is an issue we have debated a great deal. We understand that Facebook has become an important platform for social and political expression in the US and around the world. We are focused on developing greater safeguards against malicious interference in elections and strengthening our advertising policies and enforcement to prevent abuse.

Is there more out there that you haven’t found?

It’s possible. We’re still looking for abuse and bad actors on our platform — our internal investigation continues. We hope that by cooperating with Congress, the Special Counsel and our industry partners, we will help keep bad actors off our platform.

Do you now have a complete view of what happened in this election? 

The 2016 US election was the first where evidence has been widely reported that foreign actors sought to exploit the internet to influence voter behavior.

We understand more about how our service was abused and we will continue to investigate to learn all we can. We know that our experience is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle.

Congress and the Special Counsel are best placed to put these pieces together because they have much broader investigative power to obtain information from other sources.

Source: Duta

UCJ, UNILORIN.