Facebook’s political ads policy comes under more scrutiny
Since Facebook Inc. announced that it will allow politicians to run ads and will not fact-check those ads, the company has been hit with a wave of internal and external criticism.
This week Facebook faced even more flak. On Monday, Yaël Eisenstat, a former CIA officer and White House adviser who once became Facebook’s head of Global Elections Integrity Ops, joined in the chorus by criticizing the social media giant’s decision-making.
In an op-ed published by The Washington Post, Eisenstat said she saw social media as a threat to civil discourse and wanted to do something about it. “I wanted to help Facebook think through the very challenging questions of what role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy,” she said.
The problems, she wrote, are still there. Allowing politicians to post content that might not be true will be problematic, she added.
“The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare,” wrote Eisenstat. “Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads — ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign.”
She ended up leaving her post at Facebook after just six months, saying she felt she wasn’t empowered to do the job she had been hired to do.
It was reported that on Monday night that 10 civil rights groups met with Facebook’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at his home in Palo Alto. According to people who were in attendance, Zuckerberg isn’t budging at the moment on the political ads policy, but he seemed to suggest the policy was evolving.
In other news, it was reported that though Zuckerberg doesn’t want to change the political ads policy, he is open to the idea of banning microtargeting, meaning targeting certain segments of the population based on what data they provide.
Image: BookCatalog/Flickr
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