Reacting to the discovery that Russia-linked sources bought political ads on Facebook, the social giant is promising to expand the size of its team that reviews advertising submitted to the platform along with other measures.
The social giant, which has more than 2 billion monthly users worldwide, outlined the plans Monday. That includes hiring 1,000 more employees to review ads -- though Facebook isn't saying how big that team is currently -- as well as investing in artificial-intelligence systems to block ads that violate its policies.
"Reviewing ads means assessing not just the content of an ad, but the context in which it was bought and the intended audience -- so we're changing our ads review system to pay more attention to these signals," Facebook said in a statement.
Last month, Facebook said it had identified about 3,000 ads linked to Russian sources, representing about $100,000 in ad spending from June 2015 to May 2017 -- ads evidently designed to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Those ads appear to have come from a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, according to Facebook.
The social-media company has turned over the ads to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as well as to congressional committees.
© 2023 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.