A few weeks before the US election, reporters revealed that Facebook continues to approve fake ads from fake sources.
Disclosure naturally overrides the company's recent promise of more transparent advertising on its network.
The fact that Russia used Facebook's advertising system to interfere with the US election on 2016 does not appear to have touched the company that much, though there have been several promising statements.
At that time, the COO of Sheryl Sandberg said:
Our ultimate goal is very simple: we want to reduce bad ads, we want to make sure people understand what they see, who they pay for the ads and what they're running on.
In September, Mark Zuckerberg explained what his company did to fight all election fraud:
Now we require anyone asking for US advertising to verify their identity and place of residence. This prevents someone from Russia, for example, from buying political ads in the United States and adding additional obstacles to those who try to hide their identity or their location using fake accounts.
But this month, VICE News has demonstrated that Facebook's political advertising system is not working. Journalists made it tests to see how carefully the advertiser controls the company.
Journalists asked to buy ads using fake political groups such as Cookies for Political Transparency. In the applications made by the journalists, and in the context of "paid by" they used names from all the US senators but also many others. Facebook approved all ads.
VICE, in his trials, used the names of Mike Pence, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez and ISIS. Facebook approved all ads, except Hillary Clinton was supposed to pay.
Η team of VICE didn't pay for the ads because it stopped the process immediately after approval. But it proved that Mark Zuckerberg's promises to improve transparency in political advertising have no value.
Business Insider has now also taken place tests with Facebook ads. Made two different ads related to Brexit in the UK, and was approved even though he used her as a payment name Cambridge Analytica.
For those who don't remember, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from using the social network, after a scandal with data of users used in the 2016 US election.
So what does it take to run a paid political ad on Facebook? Both groups of journalists said that all they needed to do was give them a driver's license and a valid address.
This means that Facebook could identify who initiated the process for the ad. This may be transparent enough for Facebook, but it doesn't stop fake ads posted with fake identities.
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