Facebook, Google and Twitter's political ad policies are bad for democracy | By Ann M. Ravel for CNNBusiness Perspectives
Ann M. Ravel is the Digital Deception Project Director at MapLight and previously served as chair of the Federal Election Commission. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.
.leftside-floating-image { width:100%; display:block; margin:0 auto 1.5rem; } @media screen and { .leftside-floating-image { float:left; width:50%; max-width: 200px; display:block; margin:0 1.5rem 1rem 0; } } As the 2020 election nears, the big three social media companies have been scrambling to solidify their approaches to political advertising.
Last month, Google, which owns YouTube, announced that it would limit certain types of political ad targeting, but made no change in allowing politicians to run false ads. Twitter made waves by announcing that it would ban certain types of political advertising on its platform. And Facebook announced that it would not fact-check ads by politicians — but would still fact-check other advertisements.
Google's recent decision to limit microtargeting — a technique allowing advertisers to target messages to very specific and narrow groups, or even individuals — has also been met with controversy on both sides of the aisle. In its current state, microtargeting is hugely problematic because it allows political actors to run advertising with little transparency about who is seeing what, which could help attempts to run voter suppression campaigns.
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