Facebook has declared that it is not going to accept any new political ads in the seven days Before the US presidential election to be held on November 3rd. Nevertheless, Facebook will still permit existing ads to resume to be promoted and targeted at different users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the measure in a Facebook post.
He said that he was “worried” about divisions in USA potentially leading to civil unrest.
He added that Facebook would also label posts from candidates attempting to announce victory before the votes had been counted.
The social network has faced criticism for permitting political ads to be “micro-targeted” on its platform so that they are only seen by small communities rather than debated more widely in the days after they appear.
The Mozilla Foundation has claimed that this makes it easier for politicians and their supporters to parade fiction as fact and avoid being called out on it until it is too late, specifically as Facebook has formerly said ads put by candidates would not be fact-checked.
The new steps could serve as a precedent for how the firm handles elections anywhere in the future.
Facebook also unveiled that it would delete videos of President Trump encouraging voters in North Carolina to vote twice, which is illegal.
Any videos of Mr Trump’s comments without contextualising information would be taken down, the firm said in a statement: “This video violates our policies prohibiting voter fraud and we will remove it unless it is shared to correct the record.”
