Facebook keeps digging itself into the hole

From a report in the Washington Post highlighted by Charles Arthur:

The Arizona ad, paid for by The Committee to Defend the President, is one of roughly two dozen such ads that two pro-Trump super PACs have purchased on Facebook over the past five months, according to an analysis of Facebook’s advertising archive by The Washington Post. Some of the ads falsely suggest that Democrats are purging voter rolls; others direct viewers to some version of a voter-registration form, but only after they submit information, such as their names, email addresses and political affiliations.

Responding to an inquiry from The Post, Facebook said this weekend that it was removing four of the voting-related ads for violating its policies. A spokesperson for the tech giant said it would send other ads purchased by another pro-Trump group, Great America PAC, to third-party fact-checkers to verify their assertions about states purging voter rolls.

Charles’s comment:

So Facebook won’t allow ads that might lead to voter suppression. Apart from the ones it allows. It’s exhausting; Facebook says it won’t allow something, journalists find multiple examples of it allowing something, repeat. The simple solution would be to ban political ads.

Yep. Remember Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. And the funniest thing of all is that, in terms of Facebook’s revenues, political ads earn peanuts.

LATER The NYT is reporting that some Facebook employees are getting agitated about the decision to give politicians’ ads a free run.