Sue Halpern writes:

In the course of the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent eighty-one million dollars on Facebook ads. With a little more than a year to go until the next election, candidates have already spent more than sixty-three million dollars marketing themselves on Facebook and Google. Trump’s campaign has spent more than anyone else’s, with a total of twenty-four million dollars in digital-ad buys. Two of those ads, which were released on Facebook on October 2nd, falsely accused the former Vice-President Joe Biden of offering Ukrainian officials a billion dollars to drop a case against his son Hunter. The ads, which were seen by over four million people, include a six-second video edited to make it seem like Biden openly confesses to the scheme. When the Biden campaign asked Facebook to remove the ad, however, the company refused. “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public-policy director for global elections, wrote to the Biden campaign. “Thus, when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact-checkers.”

Most of the time, when taken to task for spreading hateful, distorted, and demonstrably false information, Facebook executives claim that the social network is merely a neutral platform, unmoored from the content it carries. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs and communications, likens Facebook to a tennis court. “Our job is to make sure the court is ready—the surface is flat, the lines painted, the net at the correct height,” he said last month during a speech in Washington. “But we don’t pick up the racket and start playing. How the players play the game is up to them.” It’s a convenient, yet inaccurate, analogy. Facebook runs on proprietary algorithms that promote some content over others; those algorithms are not neutral. Neither are the company’s idiosyncratic and inconsistent “content moderation” policies, which are supposed to police behavior on the site. As an investigation by BuzzFeed recently discovered, Facebook has rejected over a hundred political ads from Trump, Biden, Sanders, Warren, and others on the grounds that they don’t meet Facebook’s design standards or its public-decency policy. In one case, it rejected a Trump ad because it included a clip of Joe Biden saying “son of a bitch.” [Continue reading…]