The company says it has mostly fixed the "technical problems."
View on the web   Facebook glitch blocks certain political ads, raising new questions about transparency On Thursday evening, the Biden campaign reported a concerning problem: A number of their previously approved ads never ran on Facebook. The social network quickly admitted that "technical flaws" related to its moratorium on new ads in the week before the election caused the ads not to appear. The Trump campaign said that some of its ads didn't appear either. Given the context, this glitch suggests that Facebook still isn't ready to deal with the deluge of chaos that Election Day will bring. At the very least, the company is still struggling with transparency around how its political ad system works.
"Every week, there is new bad stuff that gets through Facebook's own monitoring and screening," Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU studying political ads, told Recode. "The real danger is that Facebook says it can do this job themselves, but they can't."
Edelson has a unique perspective on the problem. She and her team at NYU have been fighting with Facebook over a browser extension they built to help them study how political ads work on the platform. Facebook has demanded the tool be taken down, which actually serves to prove the researchers' point that Facebook's political ads system lacks transparency.
Recode's Rebecca Heilweil reports on Facebook's pressing problems with political ads, especially as they relate to transparency and the company's readiness to handle the 2020 election. | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | An oral history of election night 2016 at MSNBC | | | | |  | | Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. | |
