Facebook, believe it or not?
Mark Zuckreberg has been a bit annoyed lately, a democratic president candidate whose name is Elizabeth Warren’s attack on Facebook advertising censorship made him once again become the focus of public debate in the media. Warren expressed her views about Facebook in a tweet on October 12th, saying that Facebook’s changes to their advertising policy have made it become a platform for false information.
A week later, on the 17th, Mark gave a speech at the Georgetown University in response and made his point. In his opinion, this is not a Facebook job has to worry about misleading political ads, he believes that political advertising is more transparent on Facebook than anywhere else and theses political ads are an essential form of free speech. Moreover, Mark also believes that there is no necessary for Facebook to check if these political ads is true or not, public have right for themselves to see what politicians are saying and make their own judgement. FB has no right to deprive people of the right to receive and judge such information. Having said that, mark still made a change to FB’s censorship of political ads in August. Advertiser who run political or social issue in August have to show government credentials such as a tax-registered organization identification number or a government website domain.
Sure, as Mark said it is an essential form for free speech, He might be right from a political point of view, but for marketing perspective, I think there is a difference between advertising and other statements. We can’t deny that there are false elements in any form of advertisement. For example, in order to sell more apples, advertisers will use exaggerated methods to make the apples more attractive. But the essence of advertising should be to promote real products rather than fake ones. When the Facebook think that “If senator Warren wants to say things, she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech.” From a marketing point of view, this is to connive false advertising to disrupt the order of the competitive market, which will not only mislead the public, but also make the competition become unfair. Therefore, I believe Facebook should not only maintain the maximum freedom of speech, but also properly screen some false and rumorous political advertisements, which not only comply with the principle of market fairness, but also reflect the authenticity of advertising information. All after, even a perfect apple Ad can’t convince customers to buy bananas.
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