Facebook Announces Block on New Political Ads a Week Before Election Day

Photo credit: Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media platform he oversees will aim to prevent disinformation and political interference before the 2020 election. The most prominent measure being that the company will ban all new political advertising on the site for the week leading up to November 3.

In a post from his personal page, Zuckerberg expressed concern for the ongoing impact of the coronavirus, and that the country faces “an increased risk of civil unrest” if mail-in voting means the final results of the election take weeks to be finalized.

“This election is not going to be business as usual,” Zuckerberg said. “We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy. That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest.”

Zuckerberg’s post goes on to outline a number of steps the company will take to encourage voting, protect the election from outside meddling, and provide users with solid information about matters like the mail-in voting process and registration deadlines. The announcement also includes an explanation of how Facebook will limit political ads in the final days before the election:

We’re going to block new political and issue ads during the final week of the campaign. It’s important that campaigns can run get out the vote campaigns, and I generally believe the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims. So in the week before the election, we won’t accept new political or issue ads. Advertisers will be able to continue running ads they started running before the final week and adjust the targeting for those ads, but those ads will already be published transparently in our Ads Library so anyone, including fact-checkers and journalists, can scrutinize them.

The post goes on to elaborate on plans to monitor the spread of verified information regarding the election results, expand their policies against misinformation, and will remove posts that falsely claim people will be threatened by the coronavirus if they vote.