Facebook policy on political speech lets politicians lie in ads
As Facebook cracked down on disinformation flooding its social media platforms, executives decided to codify a key loophole: Politicians remained free to lie at will — unbound by the rules designed to stop everyday users from peddling viral falsehoods.
This decision, put into place last year, has sparked a sharp backlash this week among Democrats, who complain that it gives President Donald Trump free rein to use major social media platforms as disinformation machines. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a leading presidential candidate, made this point in a Facebook ad Thursday in which she joked that the company had endorsed Trump, adding that its policies allow “a candidate to intentionally lie to the American people.”
Warren’s ad was the latest salvo in a growing campaign by Democrats to pressure social media companies to curb Trump’s ability to push demonstrably untrue information on their platforms. Last week, presidential candidate Joe Biden asked Facebook to remove a Trump campaign ad that made false claims, prompting the company to refuse on the grounds that political speech is not covered by the expansive fact-checking system it put in place after the 2016 presidential election.
The Democratic complaints have emerged as a counterpoint to long-standing claims by Republicans, including Trump, that social media platforms and their mostly liberal workforces unfairly tilt the playing field against conservatives and their ideas. This argument, pushed in tweets and public statements, has made the social media companies timid in enunciating and enforcing common-sense standards of behavior online, say those Democrats, who contend that the dominant force in Silicon Valley is not political liberalism but the quest for market dominance and profits.
“Facebook has not only created a space where we know misinformation has run rampant for a long time, but they’ve always allowed the Trump campaign to take advantage of the platform to spread blatantly false posts and advertising,” said Tara McGowan, the chief executive of ACRONYM, a nonprofit that coordinates Democratic digital ad spending.
Deception is hardly new to politics, and candidates have run ads inflating their records and trashing their opponents on television and radio for years. But those falsehoods now, in the age of social media, can go viral in a matter of minutes, reaching millions of people around the world.
The pressure to more aggressively police disinformation has left Facebook and its Silicon Valley peers in a precarious position. Democrats and Republicans alike agree that social media sites must be more vigilant to protect civic discourse after Russian agents easily seeded propaganda on the Internet’s most popular platforms during the last presidential campaign. But doing so would require Facebook and others, including Twitter and Google-owned YouTube, to embrace a truth-squadding role they have long avoided — in no small part out of concern that political figures might see their decisions as biased.
Facebook’s decision to overlook deception in political advertising came to light in a speech last month by Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who’s now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications. He compared the social media platform — which has more than 2 billion global users, a total not including the company’s subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp — to a tennis court.
“Our job is to make sure the court is ready — the surface is flat, the lines painted, the net at the correct height,” Clegg said. “But we don’t pick up a racket and start playing. How the players play the game is up to them, not us.”
Clegg did acknowledge a role for Facebook to combat outside interference and to make it clear to the public who is buying political ads, but it did not mention a place for umpires to determine what is demonstrably false or otherwise out of bounds.
“It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” Clegg said. “That’s why I want to be really clear today — we do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules.”
Facebook, which declined to comment on how it formulated the policy, confirmed that it formally put it in place in September 2018, before the congressional midterm election. But even before that, some of the company’s fact-checking partners said they had never been asked to review the veracity of political ads that appeared on its platform.
The potential for abuse became clear Monday after Biden pressed Facebook to remove an ad based on demonstrable falsehoods. The ad claimed that Biden had used the threat of withholding $1 billion to Ukraine to quash an investigation of a company for which his son is a board member — even though the claim has been repeatedly labeled as untrue by news organizations. In response, Facebook said “direct speech” by politicians was not covered by the fact-checking process that Facebook has put in place in recent years.
“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, the public policy director for Global Elections at Facebook and a former digital strategist for Republican political committees and the 2008 presidential campaign of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, wrote to Biden campaign officials. “Thus, when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact-checkers.”