Facebook Decides To Restrict All External Agencies From Political Ads

This is a crucial time for democracy when more than 30% of the world's population include Indians, is going to vote in the upcoming months. Facebook has been restricting all the external agencies of running a campaign from scrutinizing and accessing the political ads from Facebook's platform.

From the report of the Guardian, the biggest social media platform on Earth, Facebook has decided to change its code to block the collection data ability of external groups on why Facebook users are targeted by campaigners.

The report also mentioned that these third-parties tools of monitoring have helped to reveal many advertising tactics of politicians before.

We can name 2 biggest examples of such external agencies such as WhoTargetsMe in England and ProPublica, an investigative journalism site in the U.S.

The Co-founder of WhoTargetsMe, Sam Jeffers said that their software has stopped working for ten days already and this time it is much harder to find a way to fix it.

The ad monitoring tool from ProPublica a US newspaper has also past the highlighted of this new move.

Facebook has also added that these changes are a part of a much bigger crackdown on plug-ins of the third parties. Furthermore, a spokesperson of Facebook has stated that Facebook will work on improving its security by restricting unauthorized access from third parties such as web plug-ins.

This move of Facebook comes in a time when more than 30% population of the world going to vote in the next few months. We will have an election in Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, EU, Israel, and Ukraine.

Facing the threat of the misuse of their platforms to gain the political upper hand during these elections, back in December, Facebook has also announced its new plan to increase the transparency of its ads alongside with defending against interferences of foreign countries to the Indian election.

From now on anyone who wants to run a political ad in Indian will have to confirm their location, identity, and details on who placed that ad.