Facebook has been under a lot of pressure lately due to its decision of not fact-checking political ads.
During the 2016 presidential elections, the platform had taken a lot of steps to avoid the platform being misused by
political groups, therefore, its decision to skip fact-checking in political as
in the future seemed odd.
Digital platforms have been taking measures to combat lies
in political ads, Google recently announced that it’ll be imposing some
restrictions on political ads by either banning them entirely or fact-checking
them before they’ll be pushed while Twitter has decided to completely ban
political ads on the platform.
As per the Wall Street Journal Facebook is now re-thinking the decision, the newspaper wrote:
"Facebook is considering making changes to its
political-advertising policy that could include preventing campaigns from
targeting only very small groups of people, people familiar with the matter
said, in an effort to spurn the spread of misinformation. The company in recent
weeks has weighed increasing the minimum number of people who are targeted in
political ads from 100 to a few thousand, the people said."
Micro-targeting was a strategy used by Cambridge Analytica
and the Russian IRA to run political campaigns on the platform which soon
resulted to be huge scandals. So the move to enhance the number of targeted
people is a good move, although it might not appear to be one.
Google had also made similar changes to its targeting tools
by altering out the Customer Match targeting, this will restrict campaigns from
targeting people through emails or phone numbers and then have the digital the platform match them with related profiles online.
The changes expected to be made my Facebook seem very small
but can have a big impact, but the social media platform can still take other
measures like fact-checking or banning political adds completely on its
platform.
However, Facebook is weighing its options and more changes are reportedly
under discussion.
