Social-Media
Facebook is continuing the election ad ban for another month as Trump declines to accept.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced an extension of its political ads ban for at least another month, noting delays in election returns due to COVID-19 and high mail-in and absentee voting numbers. The extension was revealed in an update posted to its original blog post on the subject.
The brief break for publicity on political and social issues in the US continues to be part of our continuing attempts to secure the election. Advertisers should expect this to last another month, but there might be a possibility to restart these advertisements earlier, reads the update. This year's US election results may take longer than in previous elections due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and more people voting by mail. We also put in place a number of measures and goods to help protect the legitimacy of the election and reduce the opportunity for misunderstanding or violence.
What Facebook does not specifically note is that the latest US presidential campaign has already been called in favour of President-elect Joe Biden, though President Donald Trump has failed to accept and uses voter manipulation allegations to dispute the outcome and pose legal questions in the frontline states.
This means that Facebook's ban on advertisements essentially forbids Trump from wrongly claiming victories by ads or using his network to make such false or deceptive statements (although he can also do so by posting to his website or other White House accounts). And because Trump's reluctance to admit and the repercussions of that action will only drag on long in the next month and probably January until the opening day, Facebook's ban seems to be one weapon that the organization feels it will use to avoid further dissemination of disinformation on its social network.
Facebook's political ban on ads was revealed at the beginning of October and came into effect on election day. It was the culmination of several months of deliberation within the executive ranks of the organization, and a harsh criticism by opponents of its silence, of how best to contend with an election cycle fraught with false allegations of electoral manipulation, unverified tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic, and other politically charged concerns.
Facebook, including Twitter and YouTube, have been involved in a high-profile wack-a-mole moderation game, most notably against the president and his team, about inaccurate and fake content that has been uploaded on his network since 4 November. Yet, since the ad ban is in effect, Facebook is able to mark Trump's tweets in ways that they would not be able to do so if the comments were marketed to campaign advertising.
Democrats are also concerned that the ban will impede their digital lobbying activities to win prized seats in the Georgian runoff elections in January, according to Roll Call. Without Facebook advertisements, party leaders are concerned that they won't be able to leverage the energy of Biden's presidential victory to galvanize online supporters.
If Facebook and Google are genuinely unable to review and reliably run Georgian Senate ads without opening floodgates of paid misinformation across their sites, it is a damning indictment of their own business model, said Nicole Gill, Executive Director of Internet Policy Lobbying Organization Responsible Tech, in a statement. These corporations are already failing to curtail the viral dissemination of conspiracy theories intended to de-legitimize our elections. As has already been the case, false organic content — promoted by poisonous algorithms — continues to fuel the social media's misinformation epidemic, not paid content.Preventing promotional strategies to educate Georgians about how and when to engage in these crucial runoff elections is deliberately counterproductive to democracy.
After the ban came into place, Facebook's internal surveillance systems have also started to report a spike in abuse and incitement patterns. The organization lists those statistics as a representation of how users communicate, debate and post links on the site, and it has only been more troubling after the election day and after Trump and his campaign have continued to escalate language about refusing to accept.
