Should Facebook allow political ads?

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Should Facebook allow political ads?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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C F · Answer 1 · 2020-09-21T14:11:12+0000

Clarifying question: will these political ads be served via Facebook Ads on Facebook and Instagram? Yes

Clarifying questions: are we talking about political ads prior to an election? Yes

Clarifying questions: are we talking about a particular country? No

Given the upcoming US elections, I would like to use this concrete use case to answer the question.

1. Facebook's mission is to build communities and give people the tools to connect with each other. In the case of Facebook Ads, Facebook gives advertisers a way to connect with future customers and fans. Advertisers are able to create campaigns that target specific sets of users based on the goal of their campaign. For example, advertisers can target users based on their age, gender, geographic location and interests. Advertisers could be businesses, influencers, non-profits, government bodies or potentially politicians / election candidates.

2. To answer the question of whether political ads should be allowed, I want to go through the pros and cons:

3.

Allow Ads

Pros

- Restricting the definition of "Advertiser" could take you down a slippery slope - if you are not allowing politicians to reach their audience, who next?
- Politicians have at their disposal funds to campaign and this can be done in any way - leaflets, TV ads and digital campaigns. If political candidates do not spend on Facebook, they will spend on another platform. (revenue opportunity loss)
- Algorithm is designed to show users ads that reflect their opinions/interests - ads would be effective from the advertiser's perspective.

Cons

- Cambridge Analytica scandal is still fresh in people's minds - allowing political ads could revive bad PR
- Algorithm is designed to show users ads that reflect their opinions/interests which means that ads from the campaign that they oppose are unlikely to be shown. There should be space for debates to allow the electorate to have an informed opinion.
- Inflammatory comments from certain political candidates would be advertised on the platform, which could cause public outrage.

4. Pro arguments are aligned with the user's benefits. Con arguments are centered around Facebook's public opinion.

5. Based on my pro/con analysis, I would argue that putting in place a banket rule that forbids political ads would not be a good idea. However, some restrictions would be advisable in order to 1) prevent the circulation of fake news and hate speech, 2) restrict access to some user data 3) ensure that there is a level playing field for all parties that wish to advertise on the platform.

6. Some of the restrictions that could be considered and how they could be implemented:

- should we allow political ads to target based on people's ethnicity, religion or sensitive interests? If an ad is declared as a political ad, those targeting options would not be available (needs to be researched / further discussed)

- does the ad campaign contain violent or hateful speech? Use a two-step AI+human to validate that the ad is eligible to run on Facebook's network (however, this could delay the go-live date and frustrate users)

- does a user match targeting settings for multiple political ad campaigns? There could a mechanism to ensure fairness / give all the political campaigns the same opportunity to show their ads (this could be tricky given bidding mechanism)