An American website that pumped out uncorroborated articles about Canadian politics during the federal election campaign was allowed to promote its content via paid ads on Facebook despite the fact that its articles have been repeatedly deemed false by news organizations, including by one of Facebook’s own fact-checking partners.This kind of contradiction — possible because political ads aren’t subject to the same fact checking as non-political ads — was singled out by Facebook employees in a scathing letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg made public this week.“Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized detrimental impact on our community,” stated the letter, signed by more than 250 employees, according to a report in the New York Times. “Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for.”Under heavy criticism since 2016, Facebook has spent years investing in fact checking to combat viral falsehoods. But that work risks being “undone” by a policy that allows users to pay to promote the very false claims Facebook claims to be combating, the letter says.“Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing,” the letter states. “Misinformation affects us all … (It) has the potential to increase distrust in our platform by allowing similar paid and organic content to sit side-by-side … It communicates that we are OK profiting from deliberate misinformation campaigns by those in or seeking positions of power.”In the final week before the Oct. 21 election, The Buffalo Chronicle paid to promote a story about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s alleged activities during undergraduate university citing a single anonymous source. The week before, it placed an ad for its debunked story that claimed Trudeau had paid more than $2 million to suppress a report about sexual misconduct.That sto ...
|
