One of most controlled advertisement on Facebook
You would never imagine how much Facebook controls this one. It is full of regulations and no mistakes are allowed. Still have no idea what am I writing about? Well let me introduce you to political advertising.
Reason behind it
Let’s go to the past. Remember the elections in 2016 when Trump won?
Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations — however controversial those conversations often were. There was a lot of fake news spread in the Facebook groups (closed or opened) and the opinions were changed. You can change buyers opinion why couldn’t you change who should people vote for. Trumps Facebook advertising campaign tested more than 50,000 ad variations each day in an attempt to micro-target voters. They went so far that Facebook’s elections advertising allows campaigns to take lists of registered voters drawn from public records and find those people on Facebook. Surreal, right? Many of the newspapers and media websites claim that Facebook helped Trump win elections.
Who restricts advertising?
So that’s why Facebook changed it’s policy about political advertising. While Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads, Facebook choose to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads. Full transparency in online political advertising includes disclosing each ads’ content, detailed information on who paid for it, how the buyer’s identity was verified, how the ad was targeted, and who ended up seeing the ad.
Policy behind advertising
Ads about social issues, elections or politics are:
- Made by, on behalf of or about a current or former candidate for public office, a political figure, a political party or advocates for the outcome of an election to public office; or
- About any election, referendum or ballot initiative, including “go out and vote” or election campaigns; or
- About social issues in any place where the ad is being placed; or
- Regulated as political advertising.
Advertisers interested in placing these ads should complete the ad authorization process. The process is available for advertisers that reside in the targeted country. Documents for authorization must be issued by an advertiser’s local country or state and can’t be expired. In selected countries, a notarized form is also accepted.
These ads must have a disclaimer with the name and entity that paid for the ads. If an ad runs without a disclaimer, it’ll be paused, disapproved and added to the Ad Library, until the advertiser completes the authorization process. Requirements vary by country.
So where’s the problem?
Although Facebook has allowed us to see which of the political candidates are being advertised, what their ads look like and who is paying them, Facebook still has one major issue. This issue is about fact-checking, sadly their algorithm won’t check what is written in the ads and it isn’t going to check whether the facts are true or not. Here again we come to the fact that it is easily possible that we will see the spread of fake news on an increasing scale, which is difficult to stop at the end of the day.
One must therefore wonder whether such a corporate and capitalist-oriented company — which, after all, has a fair amount of suspicion and proven and already mentioned scams regarding user privacy violations — can be expected to download or ban well-paid ads and even if they were “genuinely debatable”? And, realistically, is that her job at all? So, as much as we may not be pleased, this is a logical outcome, and Zuckerberg’s explanation of “how it doesn’t feel right for a private tech company to censor politicians or news outlets in a democracy” is one we must be comfortable with at the moment.
Another problem we face is that political advertising actually affected everyone who is advertising, not just politicians. That’s why we have big problems. Because today you cannot advertise anything that has to do with politics, not even good government decisions or bad management in politics. We come to the fact that whatever somebody from the showbiz or citizen comments on some politician or president you should not advertise it because Facebook has decided to ban you.
The question is who then actually restricts free speech. Facebook forbidding advertisement related to politics or Facebook for allowing politicians to advertise what they want without being penalized. Believe it or not, the advertising policy of Facebook itself reaches such an extent that you must not advertise the appearance of the son of a president because you are alluding to the president.
Be patient
As much as we want to change some things and we want to be different, and in doing so, we want to be better at what we do. We really want to present people with information that is relevant to them. Unfortunately, in this situation we are fighting with ourselves. Facebook’s decision is always the last and they never yield. With this we simply have to reconcile and wait for better times.
