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 like “Cookies for Political Transparency”. In the applications made by the journalists, and in the "paid by" box, they used names from all US senators and many others. Facebook has 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.
The VICE team did not pay for the ads because it stopped the process immediately after approval. But he showed that Mark Zuckerberg's promises to improve transparency in political advertising are of no value.
The Business Insider now also performed tests with Facebook ads. He ran two different Brexit-related ads on United Kingdom, και έλαβε έγκριση αν και χρησιμοποίησε σαν όνομα payments the Cambridge Analytica.
For those who do not remember Facebook, Cambridge Analytica banned the use of the social network after a user data scandal that was used in the US elections 2016.
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 find out who started the advertisement process. This, of course, can be fairly transparent to Facebook, but it does not prevent fake ads that have been posted with false IDs.
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