Facebook Inc. is considering to impose a ban on political ads ahead of the November elections in the United States. The potential ban is only being discussed and has not been finalized, the bloomberg report added.
The social media company has been upheld for its policy of exempting politicians’ ads and speech from fact-checking, allowing users to be exposed to misinformation. This misinformation may have an impact on the people’s sentiment and affect their voting the originally desired candidate.
Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign published an open letter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg calling for the company to fact-check politicians’ ads in the two weeks ahead of the election.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Biden’s digital director Rob Flaherty pointed to the issue of misinformation in unpaid content on the site.
There’s hundreds of thousands of untrackable private Facebook groups where people share misinformation and Facebook gives us no transparency into what’s happening in them
But hey, ads!
— Rob Flaherty (@Rob_Flaherty) July 10, 2020
Recently, advertisers have signed on to an ad boycott on Facebook, organized by civil rights groups to pressure the social media network to take steps to block hate speech and misinformation, in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
Advertising blackouts before elections have been instituted in various countries of the world, including U.K. Last year, Twitter banned political advertisements.
