Facebook Inc outlined plans to strengthen its advertisement systems and disclosed that about 10 million people saw ads linked to Russian efforts to influence last year’s US presidential election.
The social media giant on Monday said it would add more than 1,000 people to review the ads that run on its platforms.
Additionally, the company said it provided information on about 3,000 relevant ads to US congressional investigators.
The company last month said that accounts affiliated with Russia bought more than US$100,000 in election-related ads. That disclosure prompted a congressional probe, which now includes Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.
The companies have been asked to testify before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee later this month and the Senate’s corresponding committee on Nov. 1.
Two weeks ago, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced an overhaul to the rules around political ad spending and said that the company would add 250 employees to work on election integrity.
“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.
While Facebook said it was bulking up the staff that review ad spending, it declined to offer details on the process.
The company also introduced several updates to the ad-buying process, including tighter restrictions on content and improved rules to force advertisers to demonstrate their authenticity before they can make purchases.
Had these measures been in place prior to the election, “we believe we would have caught these malicious actors faster and prevented more improper ads from running,” Facebook vice president of policy and communications Elliot Schrage wrote on Monday in a blog post.
He added that for half the ads, less than US$3 was spent, and that US$1,000 or more was spent on less than 1 percent of the ads.
US Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat and the party’s ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, is not sure whether Facebook’s announced changes will make a difference.
“If foreign countries are advertising in a way that is designed to divide us, as a lot of these ads were, is that something that, number one, they are going to be able to discover?” Schiff said.
And if so, he asked, can the social media platform then stop and expose the action?
“I don’t have the answers to those questions. But I think those are some of the things we’re going to want to ask during the hearing,” Schiff said.
Facebook declined to expand on the nature of the ads found beyond its Sept. 6 blog post that said “the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
The company said its automated advertising system is designed to target users most interested in the topic of the messages.
“But we know ad targeting can be abused, and we aim to prevent abusive ads from running on our platform,” Schrage wrote on Monday. “To begin, ads containing certain types of targeting will now require additional human review and approval.”
Facebook groups such as Defend the 2nd, targeting gun-rights supporters, the gay rights-focused page LGBT United, and even another to attract dog lovers, are suspected as having connections to Russia, the New York Times reported on Monday.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to