Johannesburg - With just two months left before American citizens head to the voting polls for their 2020 elections, the world’s leading social media network Facebook has announced that it will not allow new political ads in the final week of the campaign.
The United States 2020 elections are set to take place on November 3.
Mark Zukerberg took to Facebook on Thursday to announce the news, saying this year’s election is not going to be business as usual.
“We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy. That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest”, he stated in a post.
“We're going to block new political and issue ads during the final week of the campaign. It's important that campaigns can run and get out the vote campaigns, and I generally believe the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims. So in the week before the election, we won't accept new political or issue ads”.
“We're going to extend our work with election officials to remove misinformation about voting. We already committed to partnering with state election authorities to identify and remove false claims about polling conditions in the last 72 hours of the campaign, but given that this election will include large amounts of early voting, we're extending that period to begin now and continue through the election until we have a clear result”, he further stated.
However advertisers will continue to run their existing ads they started running seven days prior to the US elections.
“Advertisers will be able to continue running ads they started running before the final week and adjust the targeting for those ads, but those ads will already be published transparently in our Ads Library so anyone, including fact-checkers and journalists, can scrutinize them”.
IOL TECH