"We are working to strengthen our platform ahead of elections in 2019 … Earlier this month in Nigeria, we began temporarily disallowing electoral ads purchased from outside the country ahead of the election and will implement the same policy in Ukraine ahead of their election. In advance of the European Parliament election, in late March we will launch additional tools in the EU to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on Facebook more transparent," the company said in a statement, posted on its website.
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According to the social network giant, one will need to go through authorization to purchase political advertisements, while users will also be provided with more information about political advertisements.
Secondly, Facebook is "planning to set up two new regional operations centers, focused on election integrity, located in our Dublin and Singapore offices" for better response to election-related challenges.
The third set of tools includes enhancing capacity to address misinformation and false news by either removing content that directly violates community standards or reducing distribution in news feed of those materials that deemed to be undermining the "authenticity of the platform."
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The social network also plans to provide users with more context on the information they see in news feed, and more actively engage fact-checking practices by lowering posts rated as false in the feed.
Following last year's scandal around Cambridge Analytica, which saw the personal data of about 50 million Facebook harvested without their permission to help target political advertising, the social network pledged to intensify efforts to protect users from attempts to undermine democracy.
