Clegg defends Facebook position over political advertising checks
SIR NICK Clegg has defended Facebook’s position to not factcheck political advertising as he faced questions on the issue during a conference appearance.
The social network was accused of allowing misinformation to spread on its platforms when it announced last year that it would not vet political adverts.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously said it was up to Facebook users to decide whether or not they believed the claims they saw in political adverts.
Last year some Facebook employees signed an open letter urging the company to change its position, but executives have remained unmoved.
Speaking in Munich, the former Deputy Prime Minister – now Facebook’s head of communications – said the issues could only be fixed “by legislators and regulators setting down new rules, just as they set down new
rules for cars and every new technology which has ever erupted in the history of time”.
Twitter announced last year that it had banned political advertising entirely on its platform. Sir Nick, a former Sheffield Hallam MP, acknowledged that Facebook’s current approach was not as robust as some want – which is for tech firms to start vetting and fact-checking every claim made in political advertising – but argued this would place private companies in the unsuitable role of deciding what should and should not be defined as truth.
“I know this from 20 years in politics, political speech is by definition a sort of form of caricature – politicians caricature their virtues, caricature their opponents’ vices and the idea that private companies should be the people to draw that fine line seems to us and to other Silicon Valley companies as an inappropriate power,” he said.
On Facebook’s approach to political advertising, he claimed there had been “a lot of crossed wires” about Facebook’s stance, and argued it was not an entirely new concept. He said US broadcasters were not entitled under law to block political advertisements because of their content.