Following the controversies that trailed Facebook for weeks after the revelation about the data leak of over 87 million users used to aid president Trump in the last US election, the social network’s chief technology officer will make a promise to ensure that the platform will not be used to compromise the election result in the UK.
Fake news thrived in the US, and even though Russia was blamed, the social media firm was reprimanded for not being quick enough to dissolve the divisive ads, remove the fake news created by the Russian propagandists and for allowing its platform to be abused by Russian propagandists. The Russian propagandists were accused of creating counterfeit pages to sew mistrust and influence user behaviour during voting.
To prevent a similar occurrence, Mike Schroepfer, the CTO will be pledging to ensure that every ad is authorized before they can go live in the UK and Northern Ireland in the 2019 elections which are set to take place in May.
In his opening remarks to the MPs, he will refer to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and apologise for not correctly handling users’ information and describe the incidence as a breach of trust. Contrary to the way ads are authorised without proper vetting, the CTO will promise to deploy an entirely new procedure. The new view ads button which have already launched in Canada will let all the members see the ads that any page will show to users via Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram.
To ensure proper scrutiny, all political ads will be adequately authenticated before going live- this includes the use of a tag or a label like “political” and users will know who sponsored them.
For reference purposes, every sponsored advert will be archived for seven years, including information about how many times they had been viewed and the organization or persons that sponsored them.
The entire idea is to ensure maximum transparency.
Even though the US congresspeople had questioned Mark Zuckerberg, the politicians are still concerned about how the data leaked. This is a way to prevent a similar disaster. Mike Schroepfer, however, did not immediately respond to this question. Moreover, the committee made it clear that they’d want to hear from the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. He chose to send delegates to respond to every question and concerns of politicians outside the US.
The committee is interested in having the full detail of how Cambridge Analytica got hold of so much data and to investigate if there are other uncovered cases as regards the scandal.
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