Facebook Inc will provide a way for people to track political sponsored content on Facebook and Instagram ahead of the U.S. presidential election, it said on Thursday.
The move comes after U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign started paying popular meme accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram to post content as part of its social media offensive ahead of the 2020 election.
In tweets sent by Facebook director of product management Rob Leathern, the company said it had added a new column to its free social media tracking tool CrowdTangle to show sponsored content for the presidential candidates.
Earlier this month, Facebook said it would allow U.S.-based political candidates to run sponsored content on its social networking platforms, but that the content would not be cataloged in its overall public ad library.
Bloomberg’s campaign, which is running a highly-funded digital offensive to try and beat Republican President Donald Trump in November, has been working with a collective of influential meme-makers called Meme 2020 to post sponsored content on Instagram accounts over recent weeks.
In order to be shown in the new CrowdTangle column, influencers will have to use Facebook’s branded content tool, which allows them to more clearly tag in an official sub-header that the post is a paid partnership.
Facebook said it had reached out to the Bloomberg campaign asking them to use this tool to properly disclose the posts.
