FACEBOOK has admitted it is unable to track all political adverts on its platforms as the company faces continued pressure to ban them entirely.
Within days of the General Election campaign starting, a number of posts have been targeted at users despite clearly failing to comply with the social network’s own rules on political advertising.
In a conference call with journalists ahead of the December 12 election, Facebook said it was better prepared than ever for dealing with misinformation and had set up a special operations centre where staff would work to combat the misuse of the platform.
However, when asked what Facebook was doing to stop political advertisers dodging rules, Rob Leathern, director of product, said the company was still reliant on users to flag things it had missed.
“It’s important to realise we are not going to be perfect, we are continually improving and there is a lot of improvement as we track this across global elections,” he said.
One such advert taken down in recent days was published by a page called the Fair Tax Campaign, a lobbying group run by former Boris Johnson aide Alex Crowley.
The sponsored advert asked: “Could you afford an extra £214 each month? That’s what Labour’s tax plans would mean for EVERYONE.”
The ad was taken down after the page failed to label it is political, which would have required it to display who paid to have it promoted in users’ feeds.
Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy, added: “You have to prepare when you are working in a security perspective for the world in which you might not catch everything.
“Being held accountable in that way isn’t always comfortable but it’s really important as many eyes and as many experts can engage with this as possible.”
Yesterday, The National reported that the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation sent an online open letter to Facebook and Google, urging the internet giants to implement a moratorium on political advertising until after next month’s General Election.
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