Facebook won’t police political ads
Move puts firm at odds with Big Tech over risks of unfettered free speech
SAN FRANCISCO— Defying pressure from the U.S. Congress, Facebook on Thursday said that it would continue to allow campaigns to use the site to target advertisements to particular slices of the electorate and that it would not police the truthfulness of the messages that they send out.
The stance put Facebook, which is the most important digital platform for political ads, at odds with other large tech companies that have begun to put new limits on political ads.
Facebook’s decision, which company executives had telegraphed in recent months, is likely to harden criticism of the company heading into this year’s U.S. presidential election.
Political advertising cuts to the heart of Facebook’s outsize role in society, and the company has found itself squeezed between liberal critics who want it to do a better job of policing its various social media platforms and conservatives who say their views are unfairly muzzled.
The issue has raised important questions regarding how heavy a hand technology companies like Facebook — which also owns Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp — and Google should exert when deciding which types of political content they will and will not permit on their platforms.
By maintaining a status quo, Facebook executives are essentially saying they are doing the best they can without government guidance and see little benefit to the company or the public in changing.
In a blog post, a company official echoed Facebook’s earlier calls for lawmakers to set firm rules.
“In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management overseeing the advertising integrity division, said in the post. “We have based ours on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.”
Other social media companies have decided otherwise, and some had hoped Facebook would quietly follow their lead. In late October, Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, banned all political advertising from his network, citing the challenges that novel digital systems present to civic discourse. Google quickly followed suit with limits on political ads across some of its properties, though narrower in scope.
But lawmakers have noted that Facebook ads could be a focal point of President Donald Trump’s campaign as well as those of top Democrats.
For now, Facebook appears willing to risk disinformation in support of unfettered speech.