The company’s separate decision not to limit “microtargeting” is probably welcome news to candidates of both parties, who value the ability to tailor messages based on data such as a voter’s age, gender, neighborhood, job or sports fandom. President Donald Trump’s campaign has pushed Facebook not to limit ad-targeting, a step Google took in November, and accused Twitter of trying to “silence conservatives” when it banned political ads altogether in October.

Facebook also said it is taking steps to give users more control over and insight into the ads they see, as well as improving its publicly available database of its political advertisements — allowing for more precise searches and filtering of ads and offering size estimates for their target audience. And the company announced it will soon allow users to control the volume of political and social issue ads they see.

“There’s no change to the policy regarding fact-checking politicians in advertising,” Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds said in an interview before the announcement. “We made a decision, and this is a different set of issues that we’re tackling here regarding transparency and users’ controls when it comes to seeing political ads.”

Asked whether the company’s position on that might change, he added: “As of right now, this is what the policy is going to be.”

Spending on political ads could reach as much as $6 billion in the 2020 election cycle, including $1.6 billion that will be spent on digital video, according to companies that analyze the advertising market. Facebook and Google are by far the biggest platforms for online political advertising.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. | AP Photo/Susan Walsh

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made two visits to D.C. last fall to defend Facebook’s refusal to fact-check candidates’ claims, including a speech at Georgetown University where he argued that voters “should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”

Facebook’s director of product management, Rob Leathern, offered a similar defense in a blog post published Thursday morning, saying the company is following “the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.”

“This does not mean that politicians can say whatever they like in advertisements on Facebook,” Leathern added, saying candidates must still adhere to community guidelines banning content such as hate speech or messages aimed at intimidating voters. “We regularly disallow ads from politicians that break our rules.”

Leathern also took a shot at Facebook’s rivals, writing that “while Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads, we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads.”

Civil rights advocates have been some of the harshest critics of Facebook’s policies, pointing to a long history of false messages being used to deter minorities from voting.

The backlash to Facebook’s ads policy — prompted largely by a talk in September by the company’s vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg — has reverberated from Congress to the 2020 campaign trail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused Facebook of becoming a “disinformation-for-profit machine.” And the campaign of Joe Biden, the focus of a baseless Trump campaign ad last fall that implicated the former vice president and his family in corruption in Ukraine, hammered the platform for amplifying and profiting from debunked falsehoods.

“Donald Trump’s campaign can (and will) still lie in political ads. Facebook can (and will) still profit off it,” the campaign's deputy communications director, Bill Russo, said Thursday in response to the policy update. “Today’s announcement is more window dressing around their decision to allow paid misinformation.”

Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also blasted Facebook. "It is wrong to take money from political campaigns in exchange for disseminating blatant lies to the American people. It is also wrong that Facebook is immune from any liability for the reckless political ads they sell," she said in a statement.

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Clegg told POLITICO in a November interview that the company was considering limiting candidates’ microtargeting as part of a broader reassessment of its policies around campaign messaging.

Ultimately, it decided not to.

In contrast, Google announced in late November that it would limit audience targeting on election ads to only three general categories: age, gender and location (down to a postal code level).

Google’s move, while cheered by privacy activists, drew sharp criticism from most of the political digital ad industry. Critics of the policy charged that Google’s decision at the time could deeply hurt insurgent or less-well-funded candidates, while inadvertently benefiting cash-rich incumbents who had the resources to spend money on digital ads that were ultimately less effective.

Twitter, which was only a minor player in the political ad space, went a step further than Google, banning political ads altogether.

If Facebook did decide to limit political microtargeting, it could have hurt the ability of candidates to raise money and collect the contact information of would-be supporters.

The social network has been a hotbed of political advertising in 2019. Trump’s reelection operation spent at least $19.4 million on the platform, making him the top-spending politician for the year. Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer spent at least $16.9 million.

“Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with transparency and choice,” House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who is leading a probe of Silicon Valley giants, tweeted about the policy on Thursday. “This is about money.”

Unlike Google, Facebook has "chosen not to limit targeting of these ads,” the Facebook executive Leathern said. “We considered doing so, but through extensive outreach and consultations we heard about the importance of these tools for reaching key audiences from a wide range of NGOs, non-profits, political groups and campaigns, including both Republican and Democrat committees in the U.S.”

Leathern said the company didn’t believe that decisions about political ads should be made by individual private companies, instead “arguing for regulation that would apply across the industry.” He highlighted Facebook’s support for the Honest Ads Acts — much of which was included in H.R. 1 (116), House Democrats’ sweeping electoral reform bill that passed the lower chamber in March — saying that policy makers need to make uniform regulations for the industry. The bill, otherwise known as the For The People Act, stalled out in the Republican-controlled Senate, as has a standalone version of the Honest Ads Act.

“Frankly, we believe the sooner Facebook and other companies are subject to democratically accountable rules on this the better,” Leathern wrote.

Yet Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security security officer, called on the company to take matters into its own hands, tweeting that "targeting limits and a minimal standard on claims about opponents would represent a defensible, non-partisan and helpful position."

