Facebook Weighs Steps to Curb Super-Targeted Political Ads
November 21 2019 - 11:54AM
Dow Jones News
By Emily Glazer
Breaking News....
Facebook Inc. 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.
Facebook has sought feedback on potential changes with large
Republican and Democratic political ad buyers -- about that
possible change and other ideas -- in efforts to limit how
misinformation is spread, since ads with false or misleading
information are often targeted toward specific audiences, one of
the people said.
The discussions, which picked up around the time Facebook Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill about a month
ago, preceded a flurry of announcements from other tech giants over
their political-ad policies. Alphabet Inc.'s Google announced
Wednesday it plans to stop allowing highly targeted political ads
on its platform. In late October, Twitter Inc. announced it would
no longer accept political ads and more recently detailed its new
policy to impose targeting restrictions on cause-related
advertising.
"As we've said, we are looking at different ways we might refine
our approach to political ads," a Facebook spokesman said Wednesday
night and reiterated Thursday.
(More to come)
Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 21, 2019 11:39 ET (16:39 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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