Facebook Russian Ads: Company Hiring 1K People To Review Advertisements

Facebook is hoping to keep a closer eye on political ads that appear on the site. Over the next year the social media platform will be hiring 1,000 additional people to add to the team that reviews and removes ads on the site, the company said Monday.

The decision comes a few weeks after Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would be handing information over to the United States government regarding thousands of political ads that had been traced to Russian accounts. The company previously told Congress it found around $100,000 had been spent on political ads leading up to the United States Presidential election. These ads were traced back to hundreds of accounts and pages that were used to possibly sway the election.

Facebook decided to add more employees to its global ads review team and said that it would work to better its machine learning so that it could more efficiently flag and remove ads that violate the advertising policies. “Enforcement is never perfect, but we will get better at finding and removing improper ads,” the post said.

Other than adding employees to help review ads, the company is also taking several other steps to “prevent this abuse of our platform.” These include making advertising practices on the site more transparent, tightening restrictions on advertiser content and increasing requirements for authenticity.

The company is working on building tools that will allow users to see the other ads that a Page or advertiser is running, in addition to those that users see on their own pages to increase transparency on the site.

Current advertising policies, or the guidelines by which ads are reviewed before they can go up on the site, screen to make sure that the ads meet the community standards, according to the advertising guidelines online. Those standards can be found online, but “secret” documents leaked in May showed the internal rules the company uses to determine whether a post violates those standards. The community standards and the internal rules vary a bit in terms of what’s allowed on the site.

The post from Facebook Monday says the company holds advertisers to even more strict standards than others on the site. And that going forward the company would expand policies to prevent ads that express violence even in subtle ways. In addition to restricting the content advertisers can share the site will also require more thorough documentation from advertisers that want to run federal election related ads. A prerequisite for purchasing an ad will be proving the business or organization the advertiser is buying for, said the post from Facebook.

“We care deeply about the integrity of elections around the world. We take responsibility for what happens on our platform and we will do everything we can keep our community safe from interference,” said the blog post.

International Business Times asked Facebook for clarification on these changes. Specifically, whether the new employees would be contracted workers, whether they’d be full or part-time employees and where they’d be employed, but a Facebook spokesperson said there was no further information at this time.