The social media company is announcing steps to give users more control over the ads they see. But it did not back down on allowing candidates to spout falsehoods.
Facebook is standing by its policies that allow politicians to lie to voters, while targeting their ads at narrow subsets of the public — decisions with vast implications for the more than $1 billion in online campaign messaging expected in this year’s elections.
The online giant announced Thursday morning that it is not changing the most controversial elements of its approach to campaign ads, after months of a debate that has divided Silicon Valley and brought Facebook a barrage of criticism from Democrats. The critics have been most incensed by Facebook’s refusal to fact-check politicians’ claims, accusing the company of knowingly profiting from deception.
Facebook has defended the policy on free-speech grounds, saying voters should be the ones scrutinizing politicians’ messages.
The company’s separate decision not to limit “microtargeting” is probably welcome news to candidates of both parties, who value the ability to tailor messages based on data such as a voter’s age, gender, neighborhood, job or sports fandom. President Donald Trump’s campaign has pushed Facebook not to limit ad-targeting, a step Google took in November, and accused Twitter of trying to “silence conservatives” when it banned political ads altogether in October.
Facebook also said it is taking steps to give users more control over and insight into the ads they see, as well as improving its publicly available database of its political advertisements — allowing for more precise searches and filtering of ads and offering size estimates for their target audience. And the company announced it will soon allow users to control the volume of political and social issue ads they see.
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Facebook announced this morning that it is not changing the most controversial elements of its approach to campaign ads, allowing politicians to lie to voters https://t.co/gV5wNZr23O
— POLITICO (@politico) January 9, 2020
NEW: Facebook decided to not limit ad targeting for political ads, a major split from Google. Instead, the company called for universal rules set by policymakers, not individual companies making the decision. More from @Ali_Lev and me https://t.co/2eJZz8Vuus pic.twitter.com/AENlVRAhxo
— Zach Montellaro (@ZachMontellaro) January 9, 2020
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