Facebook says politicians can still tell lies in their online ads
Facebook said that it intends to make no major changes in its policies toward political ads, a decision that will still allow candidates to include lies about their rivals in such advertisements during the current election cycle.
Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, said that in addition to not fact-checking political ads for truthfulness, the company will continue to allow for microtargeting of political ads. Microtargeting lets advertisers direct their messages at small sections of Facebook users and is seen as a method by which misleading information can be spread across the social network.
In a company blog post, Leathern said that Facebook believes that companies shouldn’t make decisions about politicial ads and their content, but that such ads should be subject to federal regulations. Leathern said Facebook has given its support to the Honest Ads Act, a bill that is intended to provide for more transparency in online political ads, and which is supported by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, and Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar.
However, Leathern said that due to the lack of federal guidelines about online political ad content, “Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies. 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.”
Facebook’s take on political advertising solidifies a position that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg detailed in an October speech at Georgetown University. At that time, Zuckerberg said he was against fact-checking political ads on the grounds that the practice hampered the ability of people to form their own opinions about candidates and their policies.