Political adverts on Facebook will now have to be labelled clearly and require authorisation

Political adverts that are posted on Facebook will need to be labelled and show who paid for them, under new guidelines.

Mike Schroepfer, the social network’s chief technology officer, announced the new measures during questioning from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee on Thursday.

He told MPs that new measures to boost transparency on Facebook would start being introduced in the UK by July this year.

Those seeking to run political adverts will be required to complete an authorisation process, and promotions will need to be labelled as ‘political’, while also displaying who paid for them.

Mr Schroepfer stressed that political advertising on Facebook is ‘a very small, low, single-digit percentage of our advertising revenue’ and the company believes transparency is the best way to protect voters from malicious political ads.

He said: ‘There are a number of challenges you’ve raised and we need to do better.’

However, he added that, for people outside the political mainstream, the combination of Facebook pages and advertising on the platform is ‘a powerful tool of free speech’.

Mr Schroepfer told the select committee that he is ‘disappointed’ by the social media giant’s handling of Russian disinformation campaigns on the platform.

MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO

• Police launch sting on ‘lazy’ parents blocking residential street during school run

• Wife ambushes husband’s lover at her home and shoots her dead before killing herself

• Alfie Evans’ parents ‘to meet doctors’ as they discuss taking terminally ill youngster home

• Parents of Alfie Evans lose latest legal battle in life-support row

• Killers who tortured and murdered mother of two will never be freed from jail

Facing a grilling about political advertising by committee chair Damian Collins, Mr Schroepfer said: ‘We were slow to understand the impact at the time and I am way more disappointed in this than you are.’

Amid laughter, Mr Collins told Mr Schroepfer: ‘It’s a high bar.’

The Facebook executive replied: ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s something we’re working very hard on.’

In written evidence provided before the hearing, Mr Schroepfer detailed plans to create a ‘searchable archive’ of political adverts in time for the UK local elections in May 2019.

Mr Schroepfer stressed how Facebook is pursuing technological solutions to malicious behaviour on its platform, where the company is ‘trying to catch these things proactively’.

He said: ‘We want to get to a mode where people reporting bad content of any kind is the defence of last resort and the vast majority of stuff is caught up front by automated systems.’

For much of its history, Facebook representatives had stressed a programme of users reporting misbehaviour on the platform – such as illegal activity, hate speech, abuse, nudity and disinformation – rather than actively policing the network themselves.

Mr Schroepfer is answering questions about how malicious actors used Facebook to impersonate people and attempt to influence elections with political advertising.

He agreed to questioning after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg turned down requests to appear.

The committee is conducting an inquiry into fake news and is also examining the use of personal data in political campaigning following the Cambridge Analytica storm.

On Tuesday the Cambridge academic at the centre of the row dismissed claims the information he harvested from Facebook users could have been used to influence voters.

Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who gave the personal information of millions of Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica in 2014, told MPs that personality scores he gave to the company were ‘highly inaccurate’ and ‘made little sense’ for political advertising.

He said: ‘The idea that this data is accurate, I would say, is scientifically ridiculous.

‘The idea that even if you had a lot more data you could make it super accurate is also pretty silly.’