With Iraq’s upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for early October, social media is expected to become one of the country’s many political battlegrounds. Rudaw caught up on Thursday with Facebook’s Iraq and Levant Public Policy Manager Tara Fischbach to learn what the company was doing to ensure transparency with regard to political advertisements. “Protecting the integrity of elections while making sure people can have a voice in elections is a top priority for Facebook,” said Fischbach in an email interview. “To help guard against foreign interference ahead of the elections, all advertisers (including political organizations and agencies) who want to run ads about elections or politics in Iraq must be authorized as being located in Iraq.” Early elections were one of the key demands of protesters who took to the streets to condemn government corruption and a lack of services across central and southern Iraq in October 2019. All preparations have been made for the elections, the IHEC said on Sunday. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) on Saturday called on the Sadrist movement and other political parties that have withdrawn from the upcoming Iraqi elections to review their decision and participate in the elections “for the sake of the Iraqi people” and the country's political process. As of early July, more than 24 million people had been registered to vote in the elections, including 120,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Rudaw: What's the reason behind your decision to focus on the next parliamentary elections in Iraq? Tara Fischbach: Elections are an area of focus for us globally as a way of enhancing voice, inclusion and transparency. Our aim is to protect people and elections. Our policy requires that anyone who wants to run ads about elections or politics must go through the authorization process and have a "Paid for by" disclaimer. Advertisers will be required to label ads about elections and politics in Iraq with a "Paid for by" disclaimer, so that anyone who views the ad can see the individual or organization that is responsible for running the electoral or political ad in Iraq. What will the process of reviewing political ads in Iraq look like? Once proactive enforcement begins on August 25, advertisers will be required to go through an authorization process before running electoral or political ads. To do this, advertisers must submit identification documents from Iraq and provide more information about the person or organization responsible for the ad to place “Paid for by” disclaimers on their electoral or political ads. Ads that include disclaimers are entered into the Ad Library and will be publicly available for up to seven years. Do you have partners in Iraq who will be helping Facebook during the elections? We don’t have partners assisting with the rollout of this tool. We provide information about our ads to the public and our users here. Do you review the contents of the ads or just who paid for them? Advertisers must follow both our Community Standards, which apply to all types of content, and our Advertising Policies, which apply to paid advertising. While our Community Standards explain what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook, our Advertising Policies are additional requirements appropriate for paid advertising. All ads are subject to our ad review system before they're shown on Facebook or Instagram, which relies primarily on automated review (artificial intelligence) to check ads against these policies. Our ads review process may include the specific components of an ad, such as images, video, text, targeting information, and in some cases, an ad’s destination. We use manual review to improve and train our automated systems, and at times, have trained global teams to review specific ads. As part of these reviews, we'll check an ad's content to see if the ad falls within the scope of our ads about social issues, elections or politics policy. Additionally, anyone who wants to run electoral or political ads in Iraq must complete our authorization process by verifying their identity with a government-issued ID from Iraq and including a “Paid for by” disclaimer on these ads. You can learn more about how electoral and political ads are reviewed on the Business Help Center. What would be the language of the disclaimer? Arabic, Kurdish, or what else? For Iraq, the product will be available in Arabic, Kurdish, English and other languages. The disclaimer must "accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad" and can be in the language of the advertiser's choice. The translation will show up based on the preferred language and location settings you have in your Facebook account. There will be ads in languages other than Arabic, such as Kurdish or Assyrian, etc. How are you going to deal with that? Our ad review system relies primarily on automated technology to apply our Advertising Policies to the millions of ads that are run across our apps. However, we do use human reviewers to improve and train our automated systems, and in some cases, to manually review some ads. What would be Facebook's penalty for violators? Our advertising policies require that anyone who wants to run ads about elections or politics in Iraq must go through our authorization process and have a "Paid for by" disclaimer on these ads. During ad review, if we determine an ad falls within scope of our policy and is missing a disclaimer, the ad will be disapproved until they complete our requirements. In certain cases, an ad that's already running can be flagged by AI or reported by our community. If this happens, the ad may be reviewed again and if it's found to be in violation of our policies and/or the ad is missing a “Paid for by” disclaimer, we'll take this ad down and place it in the Ad Library. These ads remain publicly available for 7 years and appear with a notice that the ad ran without a disclaimer. As with any undertaking, enforcement and review systems will never be perfect. We're committed to learning and improving how to make ads more transparent and make it harder for anyone trying to get around our rules. And with all active ads made publicly available in the Ad Library, we do encourage people to raise questions or concerns if they find anything out of the ordinary. Would Iraqis be able to know the budget that political parties spend on ads? We will put electoral or political ads in our publicly searchable Ad Library for seven years, and provide people with information about each ad and advertiser, which includes a range of how much was spent on the ad and how many people saw the ad. What are your areas of concern when it comes to elections and political ads in Iraq? Protecting the integrity of elections while making sure people can have a voice in elections is a top priority for Facebook. To help guard against foreign interference ahead of the elections, all advertisers (including political organizations and agencies) who want to run ads about elections or politics in Iraq must be authorized as being located in Iraq.
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