With New Facebook Ad Policy, Mark Zuckerberg is Tipping the Scale in Support of Donald Trump

This morning, the New York Times reported that Facebook has decided to prevent political advertisers from running ads in the final days before the 2020 election.

This move by Facebook shows that Mark Zuckerberg is either completely ignorant of how political information is distributed on his own platform — or worse, is knowingly putting his thumb on the scale of this election.

A weeklong blackout of new political ad creative before the most important election in our nation’s history is a shallow and dangerous public relations move, not a solution to the spread of election misinformation and violence-inciting hate speech that has proliferated under Facebook’s watch.

Right-wing publishers like Breitbart, Federalist, and the Daily Caller reach millions of voters with lies and misinformation every day on Facebook without spending a dollar on advertising.

Facebook has not only decided these pages are not “political” but instead defines their content as news, and prioritizes its distribution via Facebook’s News tab, which gives their pages expanded reach without needing to pay for advertising on the platform.

When the ability to run new ads are taken off the table, the only pages that can reach and influence Americans at any meaningful scale are those with the largest organic followings on the platform. Who are those pages? Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, to name just a few.

By banning all new political ads in the critical final days before Election Day- that is taking place in a pandemic, no less — Facebook’s new policy will not allow campaigns or organizations to respond in a meaningful way to breaking news stories or misinformation that is spreading freely on the platform, and instead will let right-wing media personalities like Ben Shapiro drive the conversation.

This policy will ensure that these pages are able to drive whatever narratives — true or untrue — about the election and the candidates without regulation and with expansive reach to tens of millions of voters.

Facebook should immediately reverse this decision, and take swift, concrete action to declare sites like Breitbart, The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and Federalist as political entities subject to the same rules as political campaigns.

To put it simply: By banning new political ads in the final critical days of the 2020 election, Facebook has decided to tip the scales of the election to those with the greatest followings on Facebook — and that includes President Trump and the right-wing media that serves him.