An exhaustive study conducted by academic researchers at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering found "systemic flaws" in Facebook's political advertising monitoring and enforcement, with many of the worst offenders exhibiting the same disinformation and non-disclosure issues that Russia's Internet Research Agency used to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The study, "A Security Analysis of the Facebook Ad Library," examined a year's worth of political ads appearing on Facebook through April 2019, and found that 55% failed to comply with Facebook's most basic policies for disclosing their funding sources.
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Even more alarming, the researchers found that many of the ads were "placed by likely inauthentic advertisers, often using disinformation tactics similar to those employed by the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency.
The researchers also found that when Facebook discovered such inauthentic political ad operatives, it took them an average of 210 days to shut them down.
If only Bloomberg had spent a mere $100,000 on Facebook ads instead of $500 million on normal advertising, he'd surely be President. The media told us for three years that's how Trump won.
Irrelevant
Thank you to the academic researchers at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering. To offer context to the analysis, would it be helpful for the researchers to also note the following marketplace statistics: 1) In 2016 the year of the U.S. Presidential election, Facebook made +528% more money selling ad space on its pages compared to the prior U.S. Presidential election year [see SEC]. 2) According to the Mueller Report, Russia ran thousands on advertisements on Facebook with the intention of influencing the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, with ads that included anti-Clinton and pro-Trump advertisement campaigns [see https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5955997-Muellerreport]. 3) Vladimir Putin, Russia's President, has been called the wealthiest person on the planet [see Fortune, 7/29/2019 “Vladimir Putin Is Reportedly Richer Than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Combined”]. If Putin decides to authorize or direct advertising campaigns on Facebook supporting Trump again, how difficult would it be to identify the source of those ads? In the most recently reported full year (Jan-Dec 2018), Facebook made approximately $32 billion selling ad space to non-U.S. entities that ran advertisement campaigns on the pages of Facebook, and I imagine it might be difficult to positively identify all the different entities, given the expansiveness of dollars spent. It also seems as if Putin may have resources that could enable him to potentially spend billions of dollars on Facebook. It has elsewhere been reported by intelligence agencies the cracks that allowed Russia to interfere in 2016 have gotten wider since then. I'm interested in learning if there are planned next steps in your analysis. Thank you very much for your work on this subject so far.
Say hello to imperialism. Zuckerborg and his toadies need some serious Riker's time.