Facebook testing new transparency tool in Canada as Zuckerberg does damage control before U.S. Congress
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will tell the U.S. Congress this week that the social media giant is already testing a transparency tool in Canada, as part of a wider suite of policies aimed at preventing nefarious election meddling.
Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill on Monday meeting with politicians ahead of testimony at two Senate committees Tuesday, and more testimony to a House of Representatives committee Wednesday.
The congressional testimony is the climax of a weeks-long damage control effort on the part of Facebook ever since news broke in late March indicating that a British company called Cambridge Analytica used improperly harvested data from millions of Facebook users to try and sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favour of Donald Trump.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has already posted a seven-page advance copy of Zuckerberg’s opening statement, which contains a laundry list of measures the company says it is taking to combat future abuse of the platform, including hiring thousands more people to work on security and content review.
“I’ve directed our teams to invest so much in security — on top of the other investments we’re making — that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward. But I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” Zuckerberg’s statement to Congress reads.
Facebook now says 126 million people may have seen content from the Russian Internet Research Agency, along with roughly 20 million people who saw Russian disinformation on Instagram.
Zuckerberg said that from now on political and issue advertising will have to be bought by somebody with a confirmed identity and location.
And then there’s the “View Ads” function, which is only available to Canadians for now but will be expanded to the rest of the world this summer, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
“For even greater political ads transparency, we have also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. We’re testing this in Canada now and we’ll launch it globally this summer,” Zuckerberg says in the advance copy of his remarks. “We’re also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.”
One of the concerns raised in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that noxious political ads can be pinpoint targeted to specific demographic groups on Facebook, so nobody will see them except the audience most susceptible to the message. By allowing people to dig through all the ads a single entity posts on the platform, Facebook is hoping to prevent that sort of thing.
For example, if you go to the Conservative Party of Canada Facebook page and select the “View Ads” tool from the dropdown menu, you can see a series of ads targeting several specific Liberal MPs relating to the Canada Summer Jobs controversy, which involves the Liberal government now requiring groups to attest that they support a woman’s right to receive an abortion.
“Did you now that Liberal MP Matt DeCourcey voted to impose a values test on Canadians?” one ad asks. “This means organizations must agree with Justin Trudeau’s personal beliefs to receive government funding. We think this is wrong — sign if you agree!”
Those ads would likely only show up in the Facebook feed for voters in that specific MP’s ridings.
In an email, Elections Canada said that it met with Facebook about the new tool in December.
“We provided feedback to Facebook, specifically recommending that it adds an archive function, so ads that are no longer running can still be viewed,” an Elections Canada spokesman said.
Facebook now says that such an archive feature will start in the U.S. this summer and roll out to the rest of the world later.
The Zuckerberg statement is the culmination of a weeks-long crisis management effort on the part of Facebook. Since the Cambridge Analytica story broke in mid-March, Facebook’s share price has dropped by more than 14 per cent.
The social media giant said it was going to be notifying people on Monday if their data was swept up in the Cambridge Analytica breach. Also on Monday, the company announced plans to set up a program where scholars will have access to Facebook data “to help provide independent, credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally.”
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg is expected to once again apologize in his testimony to Congress, according to his prepared remarks.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”