Facebook Lifts Ban on Political Ads
Facebook on Thursday said it would resume allowing ads on political, social and election issues. The tech giant, along with Google, had placed a temporary ban on political ads following polls closing on Election Day 2020.
In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook said it put the ban in place to help “avoid confusion or abuse” surrounding the 2020 election.
“Unlike other platforms, we require authorization and transparency not just for political and electoral ads, but also for social issue ads, and our systems do not distinguish between these categories,” the company said in its blog post. “We’ve heard a lot of feedback about this and learned more about political and electoral ads during this election cycle. As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited.”
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Google lifted its ban on political ads in early December, while Facebook decided to keep its ban going through Georgia’s runoff elections in January.
Last October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said political ads accounted for a “relatively small” amount of its total sales. At the time, Zuckerberg said Facebook had $2.2 billion in revenue since mid-2018 from political ads; for comparison, Facebook’s reported $84.17 billion in revenue for all of 2020.
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