Political advertisers express that they are experiencing trouble with ads that were already approved before Facebook started its planned blackout term for new political ads heading to the election.
Last month, Facebook announced that starting October 27, Tuesday, it would not take new political ads a week before the November 3 election. The advertisers can submit and run new ads until Monday midnight Pacific Time and permitted to run those ads preceding the election as long as they obtained at least a single impression before the deadline.
For example, the campaign of President Donald Trump has pre-loaded ads stating that he was “still your president.” It is also bragging about GDP figures that have not yet been released and urged the people to “vote today” with graphics containing “Election Day is Today.” For being against the policy, Facebook said it would remove those “vote today” ads.
Even so, other advertisers are expressing dissatisfaction regarding the Facebook system’s glitches. A few spoke with CNBC they formerly approved ads — either those running for weeks or those that had run and gotten impressions then paused — started to emerge to obtain violations overnight.
“We are in the closing days of the most important election in our nation’s history. That is why it’s disturbing that our clients had their already approved and running Facebook ads shut off without warning overnight… This turn of events is hardly surprising… Facebook and other large platforms have pursued a headline-grabbing. But, the ill-conceived strategy of banning ads from political campaigns rather than focusing their considerable resources on fighting the spread of demonstrably false organic content that could interfere with the election.”
Mark Jablonowski, DSPolitical’s managing partner and chief technology officer
The progressive advocacy organization and super PAC Priorities USA’s Integrated Media Director, Maddie Kriger, said that the organization had ensured its messaging would fit within Facebook’s policies. They are creating an effort to prevent “time-bound” messages and avoid defying the system. However, Facebook stopped a few of its ads.
By Friday, Priorities had its ads prepared, approved, and running impressions, pausing several of the ads they ought to run close to the election, Kriger said. She also added that the organization’s Facebook representative stated that the ads complied with the rules.
However, as of 12:01 Pacific Time, she revealed that its ads were taken down due to violation. Kriger said it had hundreds of ads that had been made and run impressions and then paused. Some even had been running for weeks, having hundreds of thousands of Facebook impressions.
Rob Leathern, Facebook director of product management, dealt with the issues last Tuesday afternoon through a tweet.
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