Facebook Starts Enforcing Political Advertising Rules in UK

The rules means that anyone wanting to put a political advert on Facebook will need to submit a valid ID card, respond with a code that will be sent via post, and will accurately report who has paid for the ad. These include information about candidates, elections, referenda, and political causes.


Starting today, anyone placing political adverts on Facebook must now reveal their identity, location, and who is paying for the advert.

In an attempt for greater transparency following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, these new rules will now affect information about candidates, elections, referenda, and political causes that are being shared on the social media platform.

Anyone buying an advert must submit a valid ID card (which in the United Kingdom includes a photographic driving license or provisional license, a passport, or a 'proof of age card') which will then be verified by a third party, according to the BBC.

They must also show they have a UK address by responding to a code sent via post, meaning that malicious agents cannot forge documents or infiltrate bank statements to fraudulently appear to have a UK residence.

"Enforcement on these ads will never be perfect, but we'll continue to work on improving our systems and technology to prevent abuse," the company said in a statement.

Facebook has been suffering from inaction over political adverts for years now; in the US, parties were able to buy political ads under almost any moniker, including ISIS or Vice President Mike Pence, which could easily threaten the integrity of the US election system.

Alongside these new rules, Facebook has announced that news organisations will not have to register when promoting stories on their own social network; previously, any publisher who paid to promote news stories had to register as a political advertiser and store those stories in a distinct archive.

If this trial works in the UK, it will be transferred over to the US and Brazil. Brazil has been also been a battleground for disinformation, as its election was muddied by hyperpartisan information via WhatsApp.

Speaking to the Guardian, Facebook’s Rob Leathern said that it had “built more controls to help prevent politically motivated actors [who were] looking to use false news or sensationalism as weapons, and in September, we announced a news indexing process designed to more clearly and consistently identify pages posting news on Facebook.”

Facebook intends to build its own index of publishers, but it has not been fully developed. In the meantime, it is using the European Broadcasting Union, Independent Press Standards Organisation and Digital Content Next, for its definitions of news publishers.

Any political adverts will be kept in a public record for several years after publication.