Facebook plans to use U.S. mail to verify
IDs of election ad buyers
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[February 19, 2018]
By Dustin Volz
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc will
start using postcards sent by U.S. mail later this year to verify the
identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S.
election-related advertising on its site, a senior company executive
said on Saturday.
The postcard verification is Facebook's latest effort to respond to
criticism from lawmakers, security experts and election integrity
watchdog groups that it and other social media companies failed to
detect and later responded slowly to Russia's use of their platforms to
spread divisive political content, including disinformation, during the
2016 U.S. presidential election.
Facebook revealed the plans a day after U.S. Special Counsel Robert
Mueller unsealed an indictment accusing 13 Russians and three Russian
companies of conducting a criminal and espionage conspiracy using social
media to interfere in the election by boosting Republican Donald Trump
and denigrating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
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The process of using postcards containing a specific code will be
required for advertising that mentions a specific candidate running for
a federal office, Katie Harbath, Facebook's global director of policy
programs, said. The requirement will not apply to issue-based political
ads, she said.
"If you run an ad mentioning a candidate, we are going to mail you a
postcard and you will have to use that code to prove you are in the
United States," Harbath said at a weekend conference of the National
Association of Secretaries of State, where executives from Twitter Inc
and Alphabet Inc's Google also spoke.
"It won't solve everything," Harbath said in a brief interview with
Reuters following her remarks.
But sending codes through old-fashioned mail was the most effective
method the tech company could come up with to prevent Russians and other
bad actors from purchasing ads while posing as someone else, Harbath
said.
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Balloons are seen in front of a logo at Facebook's headquarters in
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Foreign nationals are prohibited under U.S. law from contributing or
donating money or anything else of value or making any expenditure
in connection with any federal, state or local election in the
United States.
The indictment released on Friday laid out in specific detail how
prosecutors believe Russians adopted false online personas to push
divisive political content, including ads. The Russians also
allegedly posed as Americans to stage political rallies in the
United States and persuade real Americans to engage in pro-Trump
activities.
Harbath did not say when Facebook would begin relying on postcard
codes, but said they would be in use before this year's mid-term
congressional elections in November.
A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details on the
plan, but referred to a company blog post from last October
announcing plans to roll out more robust identification verification
measures for political advertisers.
That blog post did not specify what the verification process would
entail.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Damon Darlin and Leslie Adler)
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