By Julie Friedman Bacchini

There has been a lot of coverage about Russian political ads run on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the effect they may have had on the outcome of the election. Congress has called major social media and Internet companies to testify before them in an effort to better understand what happened and what could be done to prevent it from happening again.

Advertising on Facebook (or Google or BingAds or Twitter) is not difficult to do. There is no verification process that happens other than you having a valid credit card or PayPal account to connect to the platform for billing. If you have that, you can start advertising. Each platform does have rules about certain types of advertising, that if you break can get your ads suspended. But those rules do not cover a lot of what most regular people would probably think they should.

Larry Kim, founder of WordStream and CEO of MobileMonkey, performed an experiment to show just how easy it was to still advertise fake news on Facebook.

Spoiler alert – it was very easy to do.

In response to pressure from Congress to do something about this, Facebook has hired more people to actively review ads and will also start posting with all ads some type of link that will let a user view exactly who placed the ad, as well as other information about their overall advertising strategy.

Traditional advertisers are less than thrilled with this, as they feel it will allow competitors to see exactly what their Facebook advertising strategies are. Details about what Facebook is doing can be found here.

In reality, it is probably not enough. Part of the problem with all of these issues is that they are moving targets. Think of email spam – every time you or your email host puts a rule or filter in place to stop one type of spam, another one takes its place, and so on and so on and so on.

Trying to have real time control over advertising, without putting a process in place that would vet advertisers and stop allowing for practically instant advertising access, seems futile.

Platforms like Facebook and Google very much want to figure this out on a voluntary basis rather than have Congress start passing laws or changing the way they are regulated. It will certainly be interesting to see how this all evolves over time. Facebook plans to roll out the greater transparency in the United States by summer 2018 (it is currently being tested and developed in Canada).

You can bet we will all be paying greater attention now!

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Julie Friedman Bacchini is the president of Neptune Moon LLC, an Exton-based full-service internet marketing and web design firm. She and her blog are regularly included in many top search marketing influencer lists. Julie has presented on topics such as web site experience, local search visibility and paid search both locally and at national industry conferences, including SMX East and PPC Hero. You can find Julie on Twitter @NeptuneMoon or reach her via email at info@neptunemoon.com or telephone at 484-341-8181.

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Top photo credit: European Parliament #PICsocial conference via photopin (license)