Facebook rolls out system to include news publishers in its controversial Ad Archive

Facebook is moving forward with its controversial Ad Archive with a new system being announced today that will decide where to include individual publishers in the archive. The archive is for ads that promote stories involving political races or issues of national importance and can include promoted stories by news publishers. Publishers and several of their associations opposed the archive, saying it would stigmatize their content to classify it as political ads. Facebook relented by roping off news publishers in a separate section of the archive but stood by its decision to include news publishers. The archive was part of a response by Facebook to deal with backlash it incurred over the spread of misinformation that occurred on Facebook and other social platforms during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook said it would start taking applications from news publishers that want to be included in the news section of the archive. Until now, Facebook has been using membership lists of news organizations to decide whether to classify an advertiser as a news publisher. But Facebook says those lists exclude a lot of publishers that are local or up-and-coming news outlets or pages of known news publishers that have dozens of individual Facebook pages.