Thailand will hold its general election Sunday, March 24, and Facebook outlined the steps it is taking to prevent its platform from being used to sway the vote.
Global politics and governmental outreach director Katie Harbath and Asia-Pacific politics and government outreach manager Roy Tan said in a Newsroom post that foreign electoral ads will not be permitted on Facebook from mid-February through the election.
The ban covers ads being run by advertisers outside of Thailand attempting to run ads of an electoral nature—containing references to politicians, parties, “getting out the vote,” voter suppression, political slogans and party logos.
Facebook will use a mix of machine learning and human review to enforce this policy.
Harbath and Tan also reminded users in Thailand that they can go to the social network’s Info and Ads section to see any ads currently being run by pages, political or not, and ads can be reported by tapping the three dots in the top-right corner.
The Info and Ads section also provides information including when the page was created and its previous names, if applicable.
On the media side, Facebook recently held training sessions for news publishers in Thailand to share best practices for their newsrooms, including coverage of elections, as well as to provide training on tools such as CrowdTangle.
