Sad news! Yes, Facebook and TikTok are approving ads containing political misinformation! A new investigation by human rights group Global Witness, in partnership with the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at NYU, has found that Meta and TikTok are still approving ads that include political misinformation, and are in clear violation of their stated ad policies.
As per the report. –
“In total we submitted ten English language and ten Spanish language ads to each platform – five containing false election information and five aiming to delegitimize the electoral process. We chose to target the disinformation on five ‘battleground’ states that will have close electoral races: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.”
The results of their test were as follows:
- Facebook approved two of the misleading ads in English, and five of the ads in Spanish
- TikTok approved all of the ads but two (one in English and one in Spanish)
- YouTube blocked all of the ads from running
It’s a concerning overview of the state of play, just weeks out from the next major US election cycle – while the Cybersecurity for Democracy team also notes that it’s run similar experiments in other regions as well:
“In a similar experiment Global Witness carried out in Brazil in August, 100% of the election disinformation ads submitted were approved by Facebook, and when we re-tested ads after making Facebook aware of the problem, we found that between 20% and 50% of ads were still making it through the ads review process.”
This is what FB has to say about approving ads containing political misinformation –
We already had no high hopes with TikTok, but Meta – disappointing indeed!
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