Having come under heavy criticism for not placing a ban on political advertisement ahead of the November 3 elections in the United States, sources close to the top hierarchy of Facebook Inc say the social networking site is now considering banning political ad.
This development is coming on the heels of Twitter Inc ban on political ads last year but Facebook has refused to replicate this saying it does not want to suppress political speech.
Facebook is yet to release an official statement regarding this development while the company’s spokesman declined to comment.
Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaigns did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Recall that Biden’s campaign team had last month published an open letter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg calling for the company to fact-check politicians’ ads in the two weeks ahead of the election.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Biden’s digital director Rob Flaherty pointed to the issue of misinformation in unpaid content on the site.
“Requisite reminder that Facebook’s problems are 80% about unpaid content and so anything they do about paid content is an attempt to distract you,” he tweeted.
Recall also that Facebook has drawn heat from employees and lawmakers in recent weeks over its decisions not to act on inflammatory posts by the president.
More than 900 advertisers have signed on to an ad boycott on Facebook, organized by civil rights groups to pressure the world’s largest social media network to take concrete steps to block hate speech and misinformation.
