Numerous Trump campaign ads have made false, misleading or deceptive claims according to Facebook fact checkers, but the company policy allowing inaccurate statements in political ads prevents those ads from being removed or users being advised of the false content, the Washington Post reports.
In 1,400 ads which made more than 22 million impressions, the Trump campaign made false statements, according to a Washington Post analysis based on data from Facebook’s Ad Library.
Those ads, for which the campaign spent between $350,000 and $553,000, were targeted at voters in traditional and new swing states like Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
An example of the falsehoods are Trump’s claims that Biden “wants to defund the police.” Independent fact checkers like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Associated Press have all ruled that statement false or distorted.
In an analysis of presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s ads, Facebook found no such intentional malfeasance. In Biden’s case, fact checkers found that the statements were primarily non-intentional misstatements by the candidate that were included in outside advertising.
When Facebook finds a non-political ad to contain false information, the ad is pulled from Facebook’s placement rotation though it is still available in the Ad Library for archival purposes.
“Political speech is some of the most scrutinized content on our platform, which ensures that people are held accountable for their words,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Post. “We’ve built ads transparency mechanisms that simply don’t exist for political ads on TV and radio or for paid political mail, enabling anyone to see and judge the claims politicians make.”
Trump’s campaign stands by the content of the ads, saying ruling them false, deceptive or misleading is simply a plot by facts to undermine Trump.
“We stand by our ads and note that most fact checks are arbitrary and usually an extension of the liberal-leaning editorial bias of the organization doing the checking,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said.