Facebook’s Political Ad Promises Mostly Miss the Mark, Study Shows

These tools largely swear on advertisers being true about disclosing their political ties , though — and those folks are n’t know forbeing honorable . Facebook knows this , which is why it also use a ( mostly automated ) followup unconscious process to sniffle out political ads that might be trying to skirt these rules .

Because these system are , again , mostly automatize , things go about as well as you ’d expect : Stories have issue forth out describing political groupsopenly skirtingattempted ad crackdown , and of regular mom - and - pop shop whose advertising got slap with apolitical label .

Now ajoint studybetween researchers at New York University and KU Leuven in Belgium suggests that that this problem might be worse than we think . The team investigated 189,000 political ads that run on Facebook between July 2020 and February of this class , and found that Facebook had missed the mark a whopping 83 % ( ! ) of the metre : 21 % were even ads for product that the platform had misidentified as being political , and the stay 62 % were unlimited political ads that Facebook just … miss .

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images)

If you ’re familiar with Facebook’sless - than - stellarreputation when it comes to moderating subject matter written in non - English languages , you wo n’t be surprised to see that the Leo ’s share of these girl came from abroad .

In Malaysia , for example , the researchers base nearly one-half of the political ads they collected—45%—weren’t mark , despite being run by blatantly political advertisers or pageboy . Pages from Macedonia , Argentina , and Turkey , meanwhile , had about a fourth of their political ads fly under Facebook ’s radar . The U.S. , meanwhile , had something of the opposite trouble : about 55 % of the political advertizing that Facebook had swag were n’t political at all ; the examplescompiledon the researchers ’ site include ad for products like a Ford tone arm and a babe cradle being trademark as “ political . ”

Of course , there are some major misses in the U.S. , too . The trailing both of these teams were doing co-occur with Facebook’stemporary banon political ad observe last year ’s presidential election . The researcher happen more than 70,000 political ads running wild on the weapons platform during this period , by pages that had openly run nothing but political ads before the Bachelor of Arts in Nursing begin — the only matter that changed is that they were n’t label anymore . And Facebook just did n’t notice .

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