Facebook’s decision to allow lies in political ads is coming back to haunt it

Last week, Facebook said it had changed its advertising policies to exempt politicians and political parties from rules banning misinformation. As a result, candidates are now free to lie in their ads, and some of them are already doing so, and I bet you can guess who one of them is!

When I wrote about this change last week, I argued in favor of this change. My rationale not all of which made it into that first column went as follows.

• There is a long tradition of lying in American politics, much of which has taken place in advertising. See, for example, the history of direct mail campaigns, or of robocalls.
• Lying is bad, but it’s good to know which politicians are liars.
• A robust (if struggling!) media apparatus aggressively documents and describes these lies as part of its campaign coverage.
• The debate about candidates’ positions and their relative truthfulness is an important part of the campaign and of a healthy democracy.
• On balance, I would rather have these discussions taking place in public than deputize a for-profit corporation to preempt them.

I regret to say that my rationale satisfied no one, 24 people unsubscribed to this newsletter, and the debate continued raging into the weekend.

Elizabeth Warren, whose campaign has been energized by our report from earlier this month that Mark Zuckerberg intended to “go to the mat” to prevent Facebook from being broken up, seized upon the policy change and called the company’s bluff buying an ad that said, erroneously, that Zuckerberg had endorsed Trump in the 2020 election. (The ad goes on to say that Warren is fibbing to make a point.) Here are Cecelia Kang and Thomas Kaplan in the New York Times:

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Ms. Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, said she had deliberately made an ad with lies because Facebook had previously allowed politicians to place ads with false claims. “We decided to see just how far it goes,” Ms. Warren wrote, calling Facebook a “disinformation-for-profit machine” and adding that Mr. Zuckerberg should be held accountable.

Ms. Warren’s actions follow a brouhaha over Facebook and political ads in recent weeks. Mr. Trump’s campaign recently bought ads across social media that accused another Democratic presidential candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., of corruption in Ukraine. That ad, viewed more than five million times on Facebook, falsely said that Mr. Biden offered $1 billion to Ukrainian officials to remove a prosecutor who was overseeing an investigation of a company associated with Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Then Facebook just a just a few days after Zuckerberg told employees he would “try not to antagonize her further” antagonized her further. A company Twitter account responded to the senator noting that various broadcast networks had aired the Trump-Biden ad “nearly 1,000 times.”

And then Warren asked what I thought was a pretty good question. She tweeted:

“You’re making my point here. It’s up to you whether you take money to promote lies. You can be in the disinformation-for-profit business, or you can hold yourself to some standards. In fact, those standards were in your policy. Why the change?”

I continue to think Facebook can make a good business case for accepting political ads with misinformation. And I think there’s a case that our politics are better when candidates have a wide latitude to speak freely, without intervention from private businesses.

At the same time, though and the events of the past few days have driven this home for me there might not be much of a moral case for Facebook’s policy here. Here’s why.

One, if Facebook accepts that politicians will lie in their ads on the site, then the company also has to accept that it will be a partner in spreading misinformation. (This is not a theoretical worry; the Trump-Biden ad was viewed more than 5 million times.) Given how much Facebook has invested in what it calls “platform integrity” a coordinated effort to rid the site of misinformation this policy is counterproductive and (for those who work on platform integrity) demoralizing.

Two, the platform has historically incentivized inflammatory speech, and permitting them in ads could mean that Facebook once again plays a key role in the outcome of the 2020 election. Charlie Warzel argues in the New York Times that given the Trump campaign’s propensity for telling outrageous lies, Facebook’s policy is a de facto thumb on the scale for Republicans. This is notable for lots of reasons, starting with the fact that the stated intent of the policy is to ensure that Facebook has less influence over political outcomes.

Three and what Warren noted so sharply is that Facebook’s policy puts it in the uncomfortable position of profiting from politicians’ lies. It doesn’t matter that political ads make up less than 5 percent of the company’s revenues it’s now the kind of inconvenient truth that Facebook can expect to take a public-relations hit over it every time a politician’s lie goes viral.

Finally, Josh Constine added a fourth dimension to consider here, which is that Facebook’s sophisticated ad targeting capabilities could make an untruthful political ad even more pernicious there than, say, in a broadcast TV ad. Reach the right low-information voter with the right lie at scale, the argument goes, and you just might tip the country into full-blown idiocracy.

I find the collective arguments in this case … persuasive? I still would far rather citizens sort fact from fiction on their own, using the information that they gather from a free press. But I acknowledge that, for the most part, they don’t.

Time after time on tech platforms, we have seen how a posture of neutrality winds up benefiting the worst actors at the expense of everyone else. And there’s a real risk of that happening again here.

In the meantime, Facebook’s effort to avoid one trap has landed it another. It may have sidestepped lots of tricky questions about what is true and what is false in the political arena. But there are few ways in which we demonstrate our values more clearly than in what we will accept money to do. Facebook has now has opened itself up to the legitimate criticism that it is spreading misinformation for profit. And with each new viral lie, I expect that criticism will only grow louder.