Facebook will not be removing an ad falsely claiming that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell endorses the impeachment of Republican President Donald Trump from its platform. The ad was posted and promoted by leftist activist Adriel Hampton, who registered as a California gubernatorial candidate in October and began running bogus political ads in an effort to test the limits of Facebook’s fact-checking policy.



Hampton’s current ad, created by a volunteer video editor working for his campaign, is tagged #ThanksMitch and features footage of McConnell spliced together to make it appear the senate majority leader is calling for Trump’s impeachment. According to Facebook’s ad library, the ad has received over 1,000 impressions and was boosted for a few hundred dollars.

Hampton told BuzzFeed News that he spends very little money boosting the ads with false information and typically only micro-targets journalists on Facebook.

“We'll keep doing them as long as we can draw attention to Facebook's broken policies around political ads,” Hampton said of the misleading ads. “We think the net benefit outweighs them being harmful in themselves.”

Facebook’s policy exempting politicians from fact-checking of their ads has been in practice since last year. It applies to politicians at the executive, national, and regional levels, including those running for office. It protects Facebook from making content moderation decisions that might drag it into a contentious presidential election in 2020 — and from taking all kinds of heat from all sides for doing so. The company currently does not allow third-party fact-checkers to use Facebook’s tools to fact-check candidates and parties.

In August, the company changed its rules about misinformation and gave third-party fact-checkers the power to remove ads that contain false statements — something many contractors only learned about in October during Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony in October. Facebook’s fact-checkers are independent and decide without the company’s input which content — including ads — they review.