New Delhi: US Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren deliberately issued a fake campaign advertisement this week to call out social media giant Facebook for running ads without fact-checking.
The ad claimed Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerburg had endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election. Warren subsequently clarified on Twitter that the claim was false, but the ad was still cleared for circulation among Facebook users.
This lack of due diligence by Facebook, the Democrat said later, allowed Trump a “free rein” to lie on the platform.
Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies—explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019
“Facebook holds incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. They’ve decided to let political figures lie to you — even about Facebook itself — while their executives and their investors get even richer off the ads containing these lies,” Warren said in a tweet thread.
Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies—explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019
“Once again, we’re seeing Facebook throw its hands up to battling misinformation in the political discourse, because when profit comes up against protecting democracy, Facebook chooses profit,” she added.
No fact-checking for ads by politicians
Warren’s ad was targeted at a Facebook policy that exempts ads by politicians from third-party fact-checking.
A blog post written last month by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs and communications, announced that Facebook will not fact-check or remove content posted by politicians, even if it is in violation of the company’s rules.
Clegg wrote that Facebook will now treat speech from politicians as “newsworthy content”, stating: “We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos. We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”
Also read: Facebook’s new ad policy, exempting politicians from fact-checks, is a bad idea
Breaking up Facebook
Warren’s ad is her latest effort in a long-drawn fight against Facebook, which began with a push to break up tech giants into smaller companies to thwart their “illegal anticompetitive practices”.
What would really “suck” is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy. https://t.co/rI0v55KKAi
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 1, 2019
In a blog post this March, Warren claimed she wants to make “big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition”.
She alleged that as these companies grew larger and more powerful, “they… used their resources and control over the way we use the internet to squash small businesses and innovation, and substitute their own financial interests for the broader interests of the American people”.
Leaked transcripts of a July meeting at Facebook revealed Zuckerberg’s purported stance on the allegations.
At the meeting, Zuckerberg told employees that if Warren became President, “I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge”.
“But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight,” he added.
Also read: Breaking up Facebook would make things worse
To be fair to Facebook, they sell advertising space. Checking whether Coke is really better than Pepsi is not their job.