NEW YORK — Facebook will soon require political campaigns, advocacy groups and other entities that buy ads about hot-button policy debates to disclose more information about themselves, as the social giant looks to prevent malicious actors from secretly spreading disinformation on its site.

The new rules governing “issue ads,” announced Friday, are aimed at Russia’s internet trolls and their ilk, which surreptitiously bought ads about contentious topics such as race, gun control and gay rights during the 2016 presidential campaign to try to stir social discord in the United States.

“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system,” wrote Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a post Friday.

“But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads.”

Zuckerberg also offered Facebook’s clearest support yet for pending federal legislation that would require the tech industry to disclose more information about political ads, including who buys them, and retain copies of them for public inspection.

“Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act,” Zuckerberg said. “This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.”

Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company should have conducted an audit after learning that data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user data nearly three years ago.

Sandberg told NBC’s “Today” show that at the time, Facebook received legal assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the improperly obtained information.

“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit, and we’re trying to do that now,” she said.

The audit of Cambridge Analytica is on hold, in deference to a U.K. investigation.

But Facebook has been conducting a broader review of its own practices and how other third-party apps use data.

Sandberg’s boss, CEO Zuckerberg, will testify before Congress next week, when the issue of elections meddling is almost certain to come up.