SAN FRANCISCO — Defying pressure from Congress, Facebook said on Thursday that it would continue to allow political campaigns to use the site to target advertisements to particular slices of the electorate and that it would not police the truthfulness of the messages sent out.
The stance put Facebook, the most important digital platform for political ads, at odds with some of the other large tech companies, which have begun to put new limits on political ads.
Facebook’s decision, telegraphed in recent months by executives, is likely to harden criticism of the company heading into this year’s presidential election.
Political advertising cuts to the heart of Facebook’s outsize role in society, and the company has found itself squeezed between liberal critics, who want it to do a better job of policing its various social media platforms, and conservatives, who say their views are being unfairly muzzled.
The issue has raised important questions regarding how heavy a hand technology companies like Facebook — which also owns Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp — and Google should exert when deciding what types of political content they will and will not permit.
By maintaining a status quo, Facebook executives are essentially saying they are doing the best they can without government guidance and see little benefit to the company or the public in changing.
In a blog post, a company official echoed Facebook’s earlier calls for lawmakers to set firm rules.
“In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management overseeing the advertising integrity division, said in the post. “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.”
Other social media companies have decided otherwise, and some had hoped Facebook would quietly follow their lead. In late October, Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, banned all political advertising from his network, citing the challenges that novel digital systems present to civic discourse. Google quickly followed suit with limits on political ads across some of its properties, though narrower in scope.
Reaction to Facebook’s policy broke down largely along party lines.
The Trump campaign, which has been highly critical of any attempts by technology companies to regulate political advertising and has already spent more than $27 million on the platform, largely supported Facebook’s decision not to interfere in targeting ads or to set fact-checking standards.
“Our ads are always accurate so it’s good that Facebook won’t limit political messages because it encourages more Americans to be involved in the process,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign. “This is much better than the approaches from Twitter and Google, which will lead to voter suppression.”
Democratic presidential candidates and outside groups decried the decision.
“Facebook is paying for its own glowing fake news coverage, so it’s not surprising they’re standing their ground on letting political figures lie to you,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter.
Warren, who has been among the most critical of Facebook and regularly calls for major tech companies to be broken up, reiterated her stance that the social media company should face tougher policies.
The Biden campaign was similarly critical. The campaign has confronted Facebook over an ad run by President Donald Trump’s campaign that attacked Joe Biden’s record on Ukraine.
“Donald Trump’s campaign can (and will) still lie in political ads,” Bill Russo, the deputy communications director for Biden, said in a statement. “Facebook can (and will) still profit off it. Today’s announcement is more window dressing around their decision to allow paid misinformation.”
But many Democratic groups willing to criticize Facebook had to walk a fine line; they have pushed for more regulation when it comes to fact-checking political ads, but they have been adamantly opposed to any changes to the ad-targeting features.
On Thursday, some Democratic outside groups welcomed Facebook’s decision not to limit micro-targeting, but still thought the policy fell short.
“These changes read to us mostly as a cover for not making the change that is most vital: ensuring politicians are not allowed to use Facebook as a tool to lie to and manipulate voters,” said Madeline Kriger, who oversees digital ad buying at Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC.
Other groups, however, said Facebook had been more thoughtful about political ads than its industry peers.
“Facebook opted against limiting ad targeting, because doing so would have unnecessarily restricted a valuable tool that campaigns of all sizes rely on for fundraising, registering voters, building crowds and organizing volunteers,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a non-profit group that works on voter organization and progressive causes.
Facebook has played down the business opportunity in political ads, saying the vast majority of its revenue came from commercial, not political, ads. But lawmakers have noted that Facebook ads could be a focal point of Trump’s campaign as well as those of top Democrats.
Facebook’s hands-off ad policy has already allowed for misleading advertisements. In October, a Facebook ad from the Trump campaign made false accusations about Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The ad quickly went viral and was viewed by millions. After the Biden campaign asked Facebook to take down the ad, the company refused.
“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,” Facebook’s head of global elections policy, Katie Harbath, wrote in the letter to the Biden campaign.
In an attempt to provoke Facebook, Warren’s presidential campaign ran an ad falsely claiming that the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was backing the reelection of Trump. Facebook did not take the ad down.
Criticism seemed to stiffen Zuckerberg’s resolve. Company officials said he and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s president, had ultimately made the decision to stand firm.
In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University in October, Zuckerberg said he believed in the power of unfettered speech, including in paid advertising, and did not want to be in the position to police what politicians could and could not say to constituents. Facebook’s users, he said, should be allowed to make those decisions for themselves.
“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society,” he said.
Facebook officials have repeatedly said significant changes to its rules for political or issue ads could harm the ability of smaller, less well-funded organizations to raise money and organize across the network.
Instead of overhauling its policies, Facebook has made small tweaks. Leathern said Facebook would add greater transparency features to its library of political advertising in the coming months, a resource for journalists and outside researchers to scrutinize the types of ads run by the campaigns.
Facebook also will add a feature that allows users to see fewer campaign and political issue ads in their news feeds, something the company has said many users have requested.
There was considerable debate inside Facebook about whether it should change. Late last year, hundreds of employees supported an internal memo that called on Zuckerberg to limit the abilities of Facebook’s political advertising products.
On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the social network’s powerful platform against Trump.
But Bosworth said that even though keeping the current policies in place “very well may lead to” Trump’s reelection, it was the right decision. Dozens of Facebook employees pushed back on Bosworth’s conclusions, arguing in the comments section below his post that politicians should be held to the same standard that applies to other Facebook users.
For now, Facebook appears willing to risk disinformation in support of unfettered speech.
“Ultimately, we don’t think decisions about political ads should be made by private companies,” Leathern said. “Frankly, we believe the sooner Facebook and other companies are subject to democratically accountable rules on this, the better.”
2020 The New York Times Company
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Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet's Google have failed to provide adequate transparency for global users around political advertising on their services, a privacy advocacy group said on Tuesday.
A report from London-based charity Privacy International said that many users around the world lack meaningful insight into how ads are targeted on social media services.
The group called Google "especially deficient" in disclosure of information about targeting, which enables advertisers to deliver tailored messages to different groups of users.
Google spokeswoman Alex Krasov said "we know there is more work to be done and we’re looking at ways to bring more political ads transparency to more regions and more types of elections."
Big internet companies have been sharing more information around political advertising following scrutiny after US intelligence agencies found that Russia had targeted American voters with social media content, including ads, to try and influence the 2016 election. Russia has denied the allegations.
A Facebook spokesman said that the company had tightened its rules on political advertising in recent years and improved transparency on both Facebook and Instagram.
Twitter did not reply to Reuters requests for comment on the new report.
Privacy International's criticisms come ahead of the European Commission's own report, due by the end of the year, on the tech companies' commitments to its self-regulatory Code of Practice on Disinformation.
The companies and trade bodies for the advertising industry signed up to the European Commission's voluntary measures in October 2018 to ward off more heavy-handed legislation.
As part of recent transparency efforts, Facebook, Twitter and Google have all launched searchable online libraries of political ads on their platforms, but these have been criticized by researchers for being poorly maintained and failing to provide useful ad targeting information.
"Companies that rely on people's data to establish their market dominance should give all users heightened ad transparency, and transparency into the targeting and funding of ads should be meaningful," said Sara Nelson, a spokeswoman for Privacy International.
The new report singled out Google for not having defined what it considers to be "political issues," saying this rendered transparency into ads on such issues on the site less meaningful.
It also argued that as Twitter, outside of the United States, does not give the same level of transparency to "promoted tweets" as it does to political ads, these paid-for tweets run without the heightened transparency they warrant.
In the United States, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner have been pushing for the introduction of the Honest Ads Act, which would require platforms to disclose the purchasers of ads, applying the same rules that exist for TV and radio.
"A patchwork of voluntary measures from tech companies isn’t sufficient — we need to pass the Honest Ads Act," Klobuchar said in a statement last month when tech company Snap, which owns disappearing messaging app Snapchat, released its own political ad spending data last month.
Some platforms, such as Chinese company ByteDance's TikTok and photo-sharing site Pinterest, do not allow political ads on their platforms.
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WASHINGTON - Even as online platforms tightened rules for political ads, digital spending set new records in the 2018 US midterm elections and appears poised for further growth in 2020.
Digital media campaign spending rose 2,400 percent from the 2014 midterms to $1.8 billion, roughly 20 percent of the total $8.9 billion in ad spending, according to preliminary estimates from the research firm Borrell Associates.
Online spending, much of it on social networks like Facebook, has been a significant factor in campaigns for a decade, but tighter rules imposed by digital giants in the wake of the 2016 election could have curbed some of that growth.
Kip Cassino, lead author of the Borrell study, said the online sector kept up a strong growth pace despite new guidelines from Facebook, Twitter and others requiring verification of advertisers to address concerns about foreign influence campaigns.
Digital has some unique advantages over traditional media like television, notably the ability to send out messages quickly and targeted to specific groups of voters.
"They can take advantage of an opportunity very quickly, within seconds," Borrell said. "You can't do that with legacy media."
Additionally, campaigns can finely target voters by geography, age, affiliation and interests, based on data gleaned by online firms.
"You can focus your messages to those people who are going to vote for your or those you want to vote for you," Cassino said.
"You don't want to waste your money on those who don't want to listen to you."
PRIVACY CHANGES AHEAD?
It remains unclear, however, what if any new privacy rules may come into effect before the 2020 election. Any regulations similar to those imposed in Europe could in theory limit campaigns' ability to target ads without consent from users.
"I would be surprised if (tough ad targeting regulations) happen with this administration," said Michelle Amazeen, a Boston University professor specializing in political communication.
Amazeen said campaigns this year were able to use finely targeted ads, including many "attack ads," whose source was not clearly identified -- in some cases seeking to get press attention from "sensational" or inaccurate claims.
"There are certain loopholes where people can run ads and there's no real confirmation of whether that individual or group is who they say they are," Amazeen said.
She added that Facebook's decision to keep these ads without better disclosure "suggests they are not really concerned about protecting the integrity of the election."
Facebook's political ad report showed $353 million spend by campaigns on its platform since May, with unsuccessful Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke the largest spender with $7.1 million, followed by Donald Trump's campaign committee with $3.4 million.
EMBRACING DIGITAL
While many candidates embraced digital, some strategists say other office seekers failed to take advantage of cost-effective online ads.
Broadcast TV still made up nearly 40 percent of all campaign spending and cable TV for 12 percent.
Amazeen said television remains a key medium because of a large body of research showing its effectiveness, and because older voters are less reachable on online platforms.
According to Cassino, Democrats outspent Republicans three-to-one on digital, but some analysts say much of that was in fundraising and not to help get the vote out.
Mark Jablonowski, managing partner at DS Political, a digital targeting consultancy for Democrats and progressive candidates, said Republicans were well-organized early in the campaign on digital, forcing Democrats to catch up with a late online surge.
"We did not see the growth in digital ad spending we were expecting" from Democrats, Jablonowksi said.
Even with candidates like O'Rourke, he said, "almost all of that (digital) spending was to raise more money, not for persuasion."
Jablonowski said it will be increasingly important in 2020 to direct more ad dollars to digital to reach younger voters.
"You want to be where the eyeballs are, and more people are cancelling their cable television subscriptions, don't have landline telephones," he said.
"There's a whole universe of people not reachable by television."
Some analysts say even old technology, like text messaging, were effective tools in 2018.
Roddy Lindsay, co-founder and chief of the smartphone organizing group Hustle, said activists for Democrats and progressives sent out more than 200 million text messages, calling it an important element in driving turnout.
Although text messages have been used for decades, organizers were able to use targeted campaigns to deliver "peer to peer" messages to young voters who might not be reached by traditional media.
"This was one of the breakout tools of the 2018 election cycle," Lindsay said.
"We know the youth voter turnout made the difference."
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SAN FRANCISCO - The state of Washington said on Monday it had sued Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google for allegedly violating state campaign finance law by failing to maintain information about who buys election ads.
The state's attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who posted copies of the lawsuits on his website, said he was seeking penalties against the companies and an injunction for failing to disclose ad spending in state elections since 2013.
Facebook said it looked forward to resolving the lawsuit quickly after it recently introduced tools for people to see who is buying political ads on its social network.
A representative for Google could not immediately be reached for comment. Like Facebook, Google has pledged to create an online archive of ads that run on its service.
Facebook and Google have faced criticism from lawmakers, users and advocates for campaign finance regulation for their role in selling political ads after Russians allegedly used fake names to buy ads to sway American voters around the 2016 US presidential election.
Unlike most US jurisdictions, both Washington state and the city of Seattle have laws dating to the 1970s that require companies that sell advertising, such as radio stations, to disclose who buys political ads. Other states put the burden of disclosure on the buyers themselves.
A Seattle official said in February that he thought Facebook was in violation of the city's law, though Seattle has not sued the company.
Ferguson said his office received a citizen complaint in April alleging that Facebook and Google had not provided legally required information on political ads.
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WASHINGTON, United States - Facebook announced Friday it will require political ads on its platform to state who is paying for the message and would verify the identity of the payer, in a bid to curb outside election interference.
The social network, which is under fire for enabling manipulation of its platform in the 2016 election, said the new policy would require any messages for candidates or public issues to include the label "political ad" with the name of the person or entity paying for it.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said the change will mean "we will hire thousands of more people" to get the new system in place ahead of US midterm elections in November.
"We're starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months," Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page.
"These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads."
A separate Facebook statement said the changes would help improve transparency and accountability of the network around political campaigns.
"We believe that when you visit a page or see an ad on Facebook, it should be clear who it's coming from," the statement said.
To get authorized by Facebook, "advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location," the statement said.
"Advertisers will be prohibited from running political ads -- electoral or issue-based -- until they are authorized."
Facebook made the announcement as Zuckerberg prepared to appear before Congress next week to answer questions about the harvesting of personal data on 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
The move also comes amid concerns that Russian-sponsored entities delivered Facebook ads designed to create discord and confusion ahead of the election and that firms like Cambridge Analytica created messages based on psychographic profiles gleaned from the platform to influence voters.
SANDBERG'S APOLOGY
Separately, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg offered fresh apologies to users for failing to do enough on privacy and data protection.
"We know that we did not do enough to protect people's data," Sandberg told National Public Radio. "I'm really sorry for that. Mark is really sorry for that, and what we're doing now is taking really firm action."
Sandberg said Facebook first became aware in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had obtained user data from a researcher who put up a poll on the social network.
"When we received word that this researcher gave the data to Cambridge Analytica, they assured us it was deleted," she said.
"We did not follow up and confirm, and that's on us -- and particularly once they were active in the election, we should have done that."
Sandberg was asked by NBC television's "Today Show" if other cases of user data misuse could be expected.
"We're doing an investigation, we're going to do audits and yes, we think it's possible, that's why we're doing the audit," she said.
Sandberg said Facebook also should have been more proactive in dealing with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
"That was something we should have caught, we should have known about," she told NPR. "We didn't. Now we've learned."
The firestorm over the improper data shared has sparked calls for investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Brussels, a European Union spokesman said Facebook confirmed that up to 2.7 million people in the EU may have been affected by the personal data scandal.
"We will study the letter (from Facebook) in more detail, but it is already clear that this will need further follow-up discussions with Facebook," spokesman Christopher Wigand said.
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