Should Facebook be obliged to monitor political advertising?
In the recent congressional testimony regarding the Facebook cryptocurrency Libra Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his company’s biggest scandals. One topic was that Facebook’s new official policy allows politicians to pay to spread disinformation, which resulted in facial reactions like these by Zuckerberg.
In California someone is now running for governor only to see how much misinformation he can spread before Facebook will decide it should take responsibility for paid content on its platform.
Twitter then took a hit at Facebook with completely banning all political ads just days after AOC’s questioning of Zuckerberg.
This raises the question on how to deal with political advertising best.
One could argue that it should not be Facebook’s task or that of any other platform to check advertisements and articles for their correctness. Spin the the idea further: does ITV have to check whether Persil really delivers unbeatable results in 30 minutes?
Checking the correctness of ads should be the task of journalists and advertising self-regulators like the ASA. These focus on the advertiser, and not the platform the ad is published on.
However, it must be borne in mind that advertising in newspapers or television, for example, is not tailored to the individual user, but rather the same advertising is placed for everyone. Facebook instead is able to target their users with specific ads and therefore has more power over what users actually see.
Moreover, detergents and other products are tested for truthfulness of claims, e.g. they must not be harmful to health. Mechanisms like these do not exist for political ads. Political statements are predominantly covered by freedom of expression. The state may not control these or only restrict them under certain principles.
Political advertising does not serve to influence buying behaviour, but rather voting behaviour and thus the whole political process. For this reason, it is of particular importance to democracy.
Election advertising on television, for example, is also regulated in the sense that all advertising must be shown,if it does not violate democratic principles,and the principle of proportionality is respected.
Twitter's decision to stop all political advertising was met with a positive response. However, a number of questions on the implementation remain unanswered, especially regarding the distinction. For example, advertising with content such as a carbon tax might be banned, but at the same time oil companies may continue to advertise on Twitter.
Also, the total ban could mean a disadvantage for new candidates that are mostly unknown. In addition, the question of how to judge posts from political parties or individual politicians remains open. Twitter promised to provide further details in November.
To enable fair political advertising, other steps than a ban may be chosen. Among other things, Facebook could be obliged to be more transparent. This means Facebook would have to reveal where parties are spending campaign money and also enforce spending limits.
The main problem we are facing here certainly is behavioral advertising in politics, for which Facebook is responsible.