Misleading political ads are the user’s problem to avoid, Facebook says

Enlarge / Facebook's election "War Room" on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018. (credit: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Following months of criticism for its decision to allow candidates for political office to tell outright lies in advertising, Facebook is trying to correct course not by changing advertiser behavior but by telling users to opt out of being shown certain ads.

Facebook today announced a change to its political ad system that will "expand transparency." Sometime during 2020, users in all countries where political ads feature "paid for by..." disclaimers, including the United States, will gain an account control for seeing "fewer political and social issue ads" on both Facebook and Instagram. US users are expected to get the feature sometime this summer-well into the depths of the 2020 US presidential campaign season.

Facebook said in October that all content posted by politicians and political candidates, including paid advertising, would be exempt from any of the company's fact-checking processes and would not be held to company standards barring intentionally misleading content. That policy, or lack thereof, has continued to come under fire as other key Internet and social media players, including Google and Twitter, amended their policies to limit or ban political advertising on their platforms.

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