Does anyone seriously doubt that if Facebook did set itself up as arbiter of permissibly accurate political speech, Warren would be citing it as an example of dangerously anti-democratic corporate power the first time they made a call the “wrong” way?
If Facebook wants to take it upon themselves to exert more stringent editorial contol on political ads, that’s their call, but it’s not hard to see why they’re wary of doing so. Here are a few good reasons, and a potential bad one.
(1) Scale. There are thousands of individual campaigns and independent groups around the world, each of which may run one or dozens of different political ads, possibly in different languages, all over the world. Any given ad may contain many factual claims.
It’s easy to apply a test like “does this ad contain a swear word?” at that scale, but making substantive determinations of accuracy is a very different order of task. Broadcast networks have a hugely more tractable one, because airtime is scarce and expensive.
(2) Tacit endorsement. If Facebook rejects ads with claims it deems substantively false, it will inevitably be perceived (however strenuously it denies this) as having vouched for the accuracy of the ads it permits.
(3) The gray area is huge. Between “unambiguously false” and “indisputably true” there’s a vast mire of claims that are arguable, technically true but highly misleading, true only by one particular metric, supported by some studies & contradicted by others, etc etc.
(4) Accountability. This is the argument Facebook itself seems to be making: If campaigns (or their allies) are lying, there’s at least some value in hashing that out as part of the public debate over their relative trustworthiness.
I don’t know if any of these is individually sufficient, but each tends to have a kind of multiplier effect on the others. IOW: “Tacit endorsement” might not be a big deal if Facebook were a perfect (or 90% accurate) filter, but scale & the gray area make that very unlikely.
(5) The Bad Reason: Facebook can foresee that, at present, any accuracy filter would disproportionately reject Republican ads, because at present their rhetoric is far more egregiously dishonest. This would in turn fuel more claims of “bias” and calls for regulation.
This is, to be clear, a bad reason in public interest terms — from Facebook’s perspective, factoring this in is... let’s say understandable if not exactly admirable.
