Facebook’s new political-ad policy already showing cracks, loopholes
Enlarge / Thumbs down. (credit: Getty Images | Ted Soqui )
If you create a system, someone will try to game it—that's true of everything from Candyland to the tax code. And so we should not be terribly surprised that Facebook—which is desperately trying to create some kind of coherent system for political advertising and speech as the United States careens headlong into the 2020 election season—already has players pushing to exploit loopholes in its policy.
Facebook confirmed earlier this month that while it attempts to fact-check certain kinds of posts and articles, posts by politicians are exempt from review on that basis, as are ads posted by campaigns. But while the social media giant doesn't care if politicians lie outright in their ads, the company does have some standards: nob—including politicians—is allowed to post ads that intentionally try to suppress voter turnout.
So when The Washington Post found a targeted ad campaign on Facebook seemingly designed to mislead voters, the paper had questions.