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The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong reports from San Francisco:

Facebook has blocked a Donald Trump campaign advertisement that promoted a false conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and Ukraine. The company said it took the ad down because it violated Facebook’s policies, but not because the 30-second video spot is misleading. Instead, Facebook blocked the ads because they contain profanity.

The video spot, which can be viewed on YouTube here, falsely claims that Joe Biden “promised Ukraine a billion dollars if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company”. As the Guardian and fact-checkers have pointed out repeatedly, this is a mischaracterization of Biden’s role in US foreign policy when he was vice president.



The video uses a snippet of audio of Biden discussing Ukraine during a 2018 appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, when he said, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well son of a bitch, he got fired.” The editing makes it appear that Biden is admitting to extorting Ukraine on behalf of his son, rather than carrying out the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The Washington Post Fact Checker column wrote of this speech: “Biden is certainly being self-congratulatory here. But, as noted, Biden’s action was coordinated with other major players in the region and celebrated at the time because Shokin was widely seen as a failure.”



The video spot, which can be viewed on YouTube here, falsely claims that Joe Biden “promised Ukraine a billion dollars if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company”. Photograph: The Guardian

Facebook has faced criticism in recent days over its policy not to apply fact-checking to political ads. Versions of the ad were viewed by more than 1m Facebook users before they were taken down, according to data from the Facebook political ad archive.

“Our systems disapproved the ads because they contain profanity,” a Facebook spokesperson said by email. “We have reached out to the campaign to let them know they must edit it before it can run again.”



Indeed, new versions of the ad with the same misleading narrative are now running with the word “bitch” bleeped out.



The Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about why the ads were only “disapproved” by the company’s systems after being viewed more than 1m times.

