Biden camp slams Facebook as thousands of ads remain blocked in final week
Thousands of ads from Joe Biden’s campaign have been blocked by Facebook as part of the social media giant’s pre-election blackout on new political ads, which the Biden camp said erroneously swept up ads that had already been approved to run.
The ads have been down since Tuesday, Biden’s campaign said on Thursday evening, costing the Democratic presidential candidate a half-million dollars in projected donations and altering the advertising plan right before the election.
Facebook instituted a self-imposed ban on new political ads Monday night in an effort to limit the potential spread of misinformation around the election, but the policy generated new criticism this week for a “technical glitch” that removed ads already running from Facebook’s system, hitting campaigns in both parties and cutting off certain messages to voters at the most inopportune time.
Biden’s digital director Rob Flaherty blasted Facebook for providing “no clarity on the widespread issues that are plaguing all of our ad campaigns since the onset of their new ad restrictions,” he said in a statement shared first with POLITICO. Flaherty demanded that Facebook “take steps today to clearly rectify and explain the depth of this fiasco.”
In a Thursday evening blog post, Facebook wrote that "even though the majority of political and issue ads have been unaffected, since the restriction took effect, we have identified a number of unanticipated issues affecting campaigns of both political parties. Some were technical problems. Others were because advertisers did not understand the instructions we provided about when and how to make changes to ad targeting. We have implemented changes to fix these issues, and most political ads are now running without any problems."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/29/biden-slams-facebook-ads-blocked-433645
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