Facebook has had nearly four years since the tumultuous 2016 election cycle, when fake news ran rampant on the service, to come up with new policies on political advertising.
Yet today,
just five weeks before the next presidential election, Facebook is still allowing groups to spread incorrect information about candidates to voters, according to preliminary research by advocacy group
Avaaz.
Facebook's official policy allows politicians to lie in ads, but prohibits political action committees from doing the same. In practice, Facebook's enforcement appears to be
lacking.
Consider this: The pro-Trump political action committee “America First Action” recently paid Facebook nearly $300,000 to spread 450 untruthful ads about Democratic
presidential candidate Joe Biden, according to Avaaz.
The ads, which began running in the middle of August, have garnered more than 9.4 million views in four swing states -- Wisconsin,
Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania, Avaaz reports in a study first publicized this week by CNN.
The ads spread false or misleading information about Biden's positions on taxes and immigration, among other topics.
For instance, one of the group's ads shown to Facebook
users in in Arizona has misleading claims that Biden “wants free health care and free tuition
for illegal immigrants.”
The political action committee paid Facebook between $2,000 and $2,500 on that bit of propaganda, which generated between 200,000 and 250,000 impressions,
according to Facebook's ad library.
Avaaz also reports that the Democratic political action committee Stop Republicans paid Facebook $45,000 to run at least 30 ads with misleading claims about
the U.S. Postal Service. Those ads garnered around 1.3 million impressions, the advocacy group reports.
Some of the misleading ads have been taken down this week, but others are still
available via Facebook's ad library.