Facebook lifts political ad ban

The company said it began allowing advertisers to buy ads on “social issues, elections or politics” on Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has announced that it is lifting its ban on political advertising across its network, resuming a form of digital promotion that has been criticized for spreading misinformation, falsehoods and inflaming voters.

The social network said it began allowing advertisers to buy new ads about “social issues, elections or politics” Thursday, according to a copy of an email sent to political advertisers and viewed by The New York Times. Those advertisers must complete a series of identity checks before being authorized to place the ads, the company said.

“We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We’ve heard a lot of feedback about this and learned more about political and electoral ads during this election cycle. As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited.”

Political advertising on Facebook has long faced questions.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has said he wished to maintain a largely hands-off stance toward speech on the site — including political ads — unless it posed an immediate harm to the public or individuals, saying that he “does not want to be the arbiter of truth.”

But after the 2016 presidential election, the company and intelligence officials discovered that Russians had used Facebook ads to sow discontent among Americans. Former President Donald Trump also used Facebook’s political ads to amplify claims about an “invasion” on the Mexican border in 2019, among other incidents.

Facebook banned political ads late last year as a way to choke off misinformation and threats of violence around the presidential election. In September, the company said it planned to forbid new political ads for the week before Election Day and would act swiftly against posts that tried to dissuade people from voting. Then in October, Facebook expanded that action by declaring it would prohibit all political and issue-based advertising after the polls closed Nov. 3 for an undetermined length of time.

The company eventually clamped down on groups and pages that spread certain kinds of misinformation, such as discouraging people from voting or registering to vote. It has spent billions of dollars to root out foreign influence campaigns and other types of meddling from malicious state agencies and other bad actors.

In December, the company lifted the ban to allow some advertisers to run political issue and candidacy ads in Georgia for the January runoff election in the state. The ban remained in effect for the remaining 49 states.

Some political ad buyers applauded the lifting of the ads ban. “The ad ban was something that Facebook did to appease the public for the misinformation that spread across the platform,” said Eileen Pollet, a digital campaign strategist and founder of Ravenna Strategies. “But it really ended up hurting good actors while bad actors had total free rein.”