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Facebook Will Require Political Advertisers to Verify Themselves

The company said it hopes the measure will prevent interference in upcoming elections.

Political advertisers and page mangers will have to be verified by Facebook going forward, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement on Friday. "From now on, every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified," Zuckerberg said. "To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location." Ads will be labelled, and advertisers will be forced to reveal who paid for the posts, he said. People who manage "large pages" will also have to be verified. "This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way," Zuckerberg added. The new verification measures are part of Facebook’s efforts to regain users' trust amid the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and prevent interference in global elections. “These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did,” Zuckerberg said.