Facebook said its advertisers must submit the additional documentation by mid-October or it would pause noncompliant ad campaigns.

“We truly understand the importance of protecting elections and have been working for quite some time to bring greater transparency and authenticity to ads about social issues, elections or politics,” said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections.

Over the past few years, Facebook has struggled with questions about election interference and disinformation on its platform. The social network has worked to secure its site during elections, setting up so-called war rooms to handle false content and bad ads during the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, as well as the national election in India this year and the European Union’s parliamentary elections. It also rolled out the transparency policy on political advertising.

Yet Facebook has applied its political advertising policy inconsistently. NBC News recently found that one political advertiser had sidestepped Facebook’s rules and was running ads under decoy company names. Last month, academics also called the social network’s ad archive — a tool Facebook introduced in late 2018 to allow the public to analyze political ads and ferret out disinformation campaigns — “broken,” describing it as riddled with bugs and technical issues.

Ms. Harbath said that Facebook’s tools were not perfect and that it would “continue to learn from elections in the U.S. and around the world.” Facebook alone cannot tackle political disinformation in ads, she said, adding that advertisers, governments, regulators, journalists and researchers will need to participate in addressing the global disinformation problem.