U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Democratic presidential campaign this week challenged Facebook’s policy that exempts politicians’ ads from fact-checking, by running ads on the social media platform containing the false claim that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed President Donald Trump’s re-election bid.
“Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies — explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes,” Ms. Warren tweeted on Saturday. “We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims.”
Facebook Inc’s policy has come under fire from another Democratic front-runner in the 2020 race. Former Vice-President Joe Biden blasted Facebook after it refused to take down a Trump campaign ad that the Biden campaign said contained false allegations.
The Trump ad claimed that Mr. Biden had promised Ukraine $1 billion if the country fired a prosecutor investigating a company linked to Biden’s son.
