Facebook says it will expand transparency around political ads and give its users more control over the ads they see
Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, announced a series of changes to the Facebook Ad Library on Wednesday, including revealing new data showing the estimated target audience size for each ad and new tools that will make it easier to search for and browse political ads.
"While Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads; we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads," Leathern wrote in a blog post on Facebook's corporate website. Facebook's decision to keep its microtargeting policy was in part a response to campaigns and other political groups that told Facebook that they rely on microtargeting to reach audiences they would not have access to without social media platforms like Facebook, Leathern said.
Leathern said more than 85 percent of the money spent by presidential candidateswent toad campaigns targeted at audiences estimated to be greater than 250,000."Ultimately, we don’t think decisions about political ads should be made by private companies," Leathern wrote, echoing an argument Zuckerberg has made several times in recent months.
Facebook, which has faced widespread scrutiny over its role in politics since the 2016 election, is also calling for government regulations that would set an industry standard on how social media platforms handle political speech and political advertising., Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of consumer hardware and a friend of Zuckerberg's, wrote:"If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all.
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