Britain’s Association of Advertising Practitioners (IPA) has expressed disappointment over Facebook’s decision not to ban political ads that use microtargeting or false claims to sway voters. Abuse. ”
The move comes as Facebook steps up its refusal to limit false or deceptive political advertising and micro-targeting. The platform said it chose not to mention how ads target specific groups of people. Some people in that group may be particularly vulnerable, gullible and susceptible to misinformation. Facebook does not fact-check these ads either.
The IPA condemned the move, claiming that “ad technology is being used to promote products and services as a weapon of political messaging.” Nigel Gwilliam, IPA’s Director of Media, said:
“In a democracy, political ideas must be expressed and discussed in public. Microtargeting can undermine this, especially when combined with lack of fact-checking and other news regulation. ”
“The Advertising Standards Authority’s provisions do not cover political advertising in the UK, and the IPA said the lack of regulation was a ‘clear and present threat to the politics of democratic nations’.”
“While we support regulation of political messages, we do not expect this to be introduced anytime soon,” Gwilliam added. The IPA calls for transparency in online political advertising as a “next best thing to regulation,” calling for a “publicly accessible, platform-independent and machine-readable registry of political advertising.” . All political ads and advertising data on the Internet. She also wants a ban on micro-targeted political advertising on the internet.
“Especially in a world of increasing automation/AI, failure to limit the granularity of targeting runs the risk of creating an enormous amount of extraneous messages that overwhelm proposed registry-like transparency measures,” Gwilliam said. explained Mr.
Facebook announced last week that it would not tackle the issue head-on, instead giving users access to a so-called “transparency feature” that allows them to limit the number of political ads they see. These will be enabled in the coming months. Facebook claims this stance reflects its belief in free speech and political debate, but critics have accused the company of being commercial and undermining democracy. Meanwhile, the social media giant is increasingly at odds with other digital giants. In November, Google announced it would target political ads more broadly based on criteria such as gender, age and zip code.
