Social-Media
Facebook advertisements have made News Feeds more partisan and less insightful in Georgia.
When Facebook lifted its ban on campaign advertising in Georgia, local news feeds became significantly more partisan and less informative, according to analysis released by The Markup on Tuesday.
Facebook forbade US campaign ads in the aftermath of the 3rd November presidential election as part of the wider attempt to tackle election disinformation. However, the site partly repealed the ban on 16 December, authorizing ads specific to the Georgia runoff on 5 January.
To research the impact of these advertisements, The Markup paid 58 Facebook users in Georgia to provide input on the material that appeared in their News Feeds in the weeks leading up to the runoff election.
The resulting data (which is available on Github) revealed a massive improvement in user feeds after Facebook reopened political ads in Georgia.
When the ban was in effect, much of the consumer feed political material originated from news organisations such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN, or The Wall Street Journal. After the election advertisements were returned, the advertising was overrun by the paying political content of Raphael Warnock's Senate campaign, VoteGOP, or other political parties.
Notably, the Markup also described a particular case in which Facebook was paying to endorse false statements.
The study highlights the $25,000 buying of an ad by incumbent Senator David Perdue, alleging that his challenger, Jon Ossoff, is China-purchased and would give our adversaries just another way of threatening our national security.
As a documentary filmmaker, Ossoff received some Chinese-linked fees when two of his films were approved to be transmitted by a partly state-sponsored Hong Kong TV station. But broadcasts were just a small part of the overall licensing market, and the assertion that his campaign was financed or sponsored by the Chinese government was labeled false by the fact-checkers.
The study comes amid numerous allegations of demonstrably misleading advertising being advertised by Facebook, frequently earning discounts long after moderators have deleted an earlier iteration of the ad.
Facebook has suffered for a long time with policy advertising, especially during the 2016 presidential election, where a Russian manipulation project successfully promoted several campaigns on the platform. Competing sites like Twitter have completely disallowed campaign advertising, but Mark Zuckerberg has justified the value of having political ads on the web for free expression, telling investors, I don't think it's right for private companies to censor politicians and news.
