Now, Facebook will let users disable political ads
What's the story
As Twitter continues its stringent policy to moderate and fact-check misleading political posts, including those by US President Donald Trump, Facebook is taking a different approach. The company has confirmed that it will not moderate political ads - on the grounds of keeping free speech - but will instead give users an option to opt-out of seeing them. Here are more details.
Feature
Option to disable political advertising
In a recent op-ed for USA Today, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, noted that the social network will give users more control over what they see with an option to turn off political advertising. The move comes as part of a broader set of changes the company has planned to embrace for the US presidential election, scheduled for November this year.
Quote
Here's what Zuckerberg said in the op-ed
"For those of you who have already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you - so we're also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We'll still remind you to vote."
Working
How this option would work?
The option to control political ad-visibility would come under the ad settings Facebook already has on offer. You will have to head over to Ad preferences > Ad topics through Facebook settings and select the "See fewer ads about this topic" option for ads on the social issues, elections, or politics category. You could also disable directly through the options for any political ad.
Change
Which ads will be disabled?
Once enabled, the setting will remove all sorts of political, electoral, and social issue ads from candidates, Super PACs, and other groups from your feed. The option, which was first announced in January, has already been rolled out to a small number of Facebook and Instagram users. It will be made available to all others in the US in the coming weeks.
Other changes
Other election-focused changes planned by Facebook
Along with this, Facebook has also planned a Voting Information Center, which will provide authoritative election-related information, including how, when, and where to vote as well as details about voter registration, voting by mail and early voting. This particular section, Zuckerberg said, will appear on top of the Facebook news feed and on Instagram, and will also be supported with election day reminders.
Interference
Work going on to prevent interference
Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook is aggressively working to prevent foreign interference in this election. "We've built some of the most advanced systems in the world to protect against election interference," he added, emphasizing that the social network has been able to protect the integrity in 200 elections worldwide and has taken down nearly 70 networks of malicious accounts since 2019.