Facebook will hence require political advertisers to give more information about their identities, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said, responding to concerns about how foreign advertisements affected the 2016 presidential election.
Mr Zuckerberg said any advertiser who wanted to run political or issue ads would have to be verified, confirming both their identity and location.
The same policy will apply to people running large Facebook pages, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive discourse and prevent interference in these elections,” the CEO wrote in a Facebook post.
The company has also developed a new tool to let Facebook users see all the ads any given page is running, Mr Zuckerberg said.
He added that the changes would require the hiring of thousands of more people, in order to get them completed by the 2018 US midterm elections.
Facebook has faced increasing scrutiny over the role its political ads played in the last presidential election. The company admitted in September that Russian nationals had purchased more than $100,000(£70,968) in advertisements on its platform in an attempt to sow discord in the election. The ads, which focused on race, religion, gun rights, and LGBTQ issues, reached an estimated 126m people.
