Facebook’s latest Trump ad takedown further exposes its laughable policies

Facebook has been pretty clear that it won’t police the truthiness of political ads on its platform. But the company apparently does have some sort of threshold for removing certain ads, and it’s pretty silly in the grand scheme of things.

As noted by Fast Company, a number of ads pushed out by President Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee have been removed from the platform because they violated Facebook’s “Advertising Policies.” 

Here’s one example. 

Image: Screenshot / Facebook

As far as political ads go, this is one is relatively innocuous. (Well, depending on what you think about the repercussions of the killing of Qassem Soleimani.) The ad doesn’t contain any outright lies  or deepfakes. 

The issue with the ad? Those YES and NO buttons at the top. Clicking those buttons doesn’t actually contribute your vote to any poll. Instead, it sends you to a survey you can fill out that also happens to collect your personal data that the campaign can use to contact you in the future. 

This, as Fast Company points out, violates the “nonexistent functionality” part of Facebook’s advertising policy. That part states that ads can’t “contain images that portray nonexistent functionality. This includes imagery that replicates play buttons, notifications, or checkboxes, as well as ads containing features that do not work, such as multiple choice options in the ad creative itself.” 

Even though the text above the image clearly states that a survey is involved, those buttons are a sneaky way of getting users (many of whom probably don’t bother reading that text) to click through, which clearly violates this portion of the policy. 

As if to prove this point, the exact same ad – minus the fake poll buttons in the image but still linked to the survey – is alive and well on Facebook.

Image: Screenshot / Facebook

Considering the damage and misinformation that can (and has) been spread on Facebook via political ads, flagging an ad because it has fake buttons is a laughable level of technicality. It’s like nailing mob bosses for tax evasion after they’ve already run rampant for years, causing general mayhem. 

But if there’s one thing that defines Facebook, it’s “too little, too late,” so I’m not sure what else we should have expected.