A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the offline move.“We are committed to maintaining elections integrity and this is something we take very seriously. The American company has also been badly hit by charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, primarily through the Facebook platform. Especially, if you consider that the maximum market size of political advertisers in India thus far, is around 20000,” said a digital strategist with a political party.While these efforts represent significant progress in ensuring ad transparency ahead of the elections, concerns remain. For a start, those in the ecosystem feel, it may not be foolproof, and there could be workarounds that political parties and candidates could resort to.Primarily through proxy advertising i.e. In a subsequent story, Vice wrote that “Facebook knew who was behind the ads internally, but externally, Facebook users would see was completely made up Paid for information.”This phenomenon could follow suit in India, warn experts.

Source: Economic Times December 18, 2018 02:23 UTC