Trump campaign ad sparks debate over online misinformation

Facebook keeps up ad that has been declared false

A controversial new ad from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is the latest example of how Facebook has become the Wild West of political advertising.

The tech giant is refusing to take down a Trump ad that includes claims that multiple fact-checkers have declared false and at least one major cable channel has declined to run — sparking a debate over online misinformation and freedom of speech.

Trump’s ad, which hits back at Democrats calling for the president’s impeachment over his dealings with Ukraine, declares that former Vice President Joe Biden “PROMISED Ukraine $1 BILLION DOLLARS if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.”

There is no evidence Biden pressured Ukraine to remove the prosecutor in question to help his son, who served on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company in that country. CNN quickly declared it would not run the ad, saying it made “assertions that have been proven demonstrably false.”

But even after Biden’s presidential campaign demanded Facebook remove the ad, the social media giant has kept it up, part of a laissez-faire policy when it comes to advertising from politicians.

Since it went online late last month, the ad has been viewed 2 million to 6 million times, according to the company’s database, which reports ad impressions in ranges. Trump’s campaign spent $17,000 to $56,000 to send it out, the company’s data showed.

Facebook did delete one version of Trump’s controversial ad accusing Biden, but that was because of profanity, a company spokesman said. The new version of the ad, which bleeps out a video clip of Biden swearing, is still online.

The company — which has faced allegations of liberal bias from conservatives — has stressed that it wants to stay away from fact-checking candidates’ ads. Ads from politicians won’t be subject to the same rules against misinformation that most other

ads on the platform are, the company announced last month.

“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Katie Harbath, Facebook’s policy director for global elections, wrote in a letter to the Biden campaign. “When a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact checkers.”

The ad also is running on Twitter and YouTube. And the cable news channels aren’t unanimous — Fox News and MSNBC both allowed it to run.

But Facebook has become the front line of the battle for public opinion on impeachment. Trump’s campaign and a joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee have spent more than $5 million on Facebook and Google ads since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry two weeks ago, dwarfing Trump’s Democratic rivals’

efforts on the platform.

In the past few days, Trump’s campaign has flooded supporters’ news feeds with ads calling for an investigation of “Quid Pro Joe” and decrying the move toward impeachment as a “witch hunt.” So far this year, the campaign has run more than 132,000 ads on Facebook, according to the platform’s database.

In addition to the Biden spot, Trump’s campaign also has run other false and misleading ads on Facebook, like one claiming that Democrats want to repeal the Second Amendment.

Trump’s campaign has defended the ad as accurate. “CNN spends all day protecting Joe Biden in their programming,” spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. “So it’s not surprising that they’re shielding him from truthful advertising, too.”

Of course, political campaigns have long spun the truth, exaggerated or taken things out of context. But ads that had no evidence for their claims or were blatantly false have often been rejected by TV stations, in part due to the potential of lawsuits, said Travis Ridout, a Washington State

University government professor and the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.

“There’s no good answer for Facebook,” Ridout said. “They don’t want to be the police deciding what is true, what is not true — but by doing nothing, they’re opening themselves up to criticism too.”

It’s an increasingly urgent question for social media companies and the country at large as more political campaigning moves to online platforms.

The techniques for misinformation also are growing more sophisticated: New technology allows bad actors to create “deepfakes,” super-realistic video simulations of a politician speaking, according to artificial intelligence researchers.

And U.S. intelligence officials have warned about foreign influence in next year’s election, after Russia’s efforts to sway votes in 2016.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breaking up Facebook and emerged as one of the tech giant’s biggest antagonists, weighed in with her own tweetstorm blasting the

company.

“Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once because they were asleep at the wheel while Russia attacked our democracy — allowing fake, foreign accounts to run ad campaigns to influence our elections,” she said. “This time they’re going further by taking deliberate steps to help one candidate intentionally mislead the American people.”

To push back against Facebook’s policy to exempt politicians’ ads from thirdparty fact-checking, Warren paid the social media giant to run false advertisements last week that said its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is endorsing Trump. The ad then admitted it was a lie.

On Saturday, Warren said the ad was meant “to see just how far” the policy goes.

“We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved,” she tweeted. “It got approved quickly.”

Even some of the company’s former executives are calling for changes to how Facebook handles political ads. Yael Eisenstat, the former head of the company’s

Global Elections Integrity Ops team, blasted the decision to keep up the Trump ad in a series of tweets Wednesday.

While she was at the company, “I asked if we could scan ads for (misinformation),” Eisenstat said. “Engineers had great ideas. Higher ups were silent.” Free speech, she said, was a “B.S.” excuse when Facebook was taking money for the ads.

But others argue that letting the tech giant decide which ads are false just gives them too much power.

Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic strategist who was Bernie Sanders’ digital director during the 2016 election, said the answer wasn’t for Facebook to selectively block ads — but instead to break up the company to reduce its stranglehold over the digital advertising market.

“We need to reevaluate as a democracy who is going to be the arbiter of truth,” Pennington said. “Are we comfortable allowing Mark Zuckerberg and his friends in Silicon Valley telling us what is true and not true?”