Facebook Will be Tracking Political Sponsored Content Publicly

Social network guru Facebook Inc. (FB) said it will be publicly tracking political sponsored content on its two platforms Facebook and Instagram in relation to upcoming U.S Presidential elections slated for late this year.

Citing tweets made by Facebook’s director of product management Rob Leathern, the company has added a new column known as CrowdTangle to its social media. The new tool will be tracking and publicly displaying sponsored contents by presidential candidates.

This latest announcement is contrary to what the company had announced earlier that it will be allowing U.S.-based political candidates to run sponsored content on its various social media platforms but the content won’t be cataloged in its overall public ad library.

Facebook pointed out that in order to appear on the CrowdTangle influencers will have to use its branded content tool which will enable them tag an official sub-header indicating the post is a sponsored partnership.

This comes at a time after U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg’s campaign team started hiring popular Instagram meme accounts to share content as one of their campaign strategies.

“We don’t have visibility into financial relationships taking place off our platforms, which is why we’ve asked campaigns and creators to use our disclosure tools. On the broader topic of political branded content, we welcome clearer guidelines from regulators,” said Facebook’s spokeswoman.