Facebook Bars Pro-Trump PAC From Advertising, Citing Repeated False Posts

Facebook declined to specify the length of the advertising ban or which posts prompted it.

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Updated: 7 August 2020 10:57 IST
Highlights
  • PAC was founded in 2013 as Stop Hillary PAC
  • The group has spent more than $15 million to advance Trump's agenda
  • Politicians' ads and posts are not subject to Facebook fact-checking

Founded as Stop Hillary PAC in 2013, the group has spent more than $15 million to advance Trump's agenda

Facebook is temporarily banning a Republican political action committee, the Committee to Defend the President, from advertising after it repeatedly shared content that was deemed false by external fact-checkers, the social media company said on Thursday.

"As a result of the Committee to Defend the President's repeated sharing of content determined by third-party fact-checkers to be false, they will not be permitted to advertise for a period of time on our platform," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.

The company declined to specify the length of the advertising ban or which posts prompted it.

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Politicians' ads and posts are not subject to Facebook fact-checking, a policy that has drawn heat from lawmakers, but content from political groups like PACs can be fact-checked.

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The committee's Facebook page, which has almost 1 million "likes," has had four "false" or "partly false" fact-checking labels attached to content since the start of July.

Founded as the Stop Hillary PAC in 2013, the group has spent more than $15 million (roughly Rs. 112 crores) to advance the agenda of US President Donald Trump, according to its website. It claims to reach millions of Americans via digital and telemarketing channels.

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Committee chairman Ted Harvey said in a statement the group would not be "silenced by 'woke' Silicon Valley elites" and would reallocate its Facebook budget to other platforms.

Reuters, a Facebook fact-checking partner, determined last month that one of the group's advertisements took a quote from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden out of context, misleadingly claiming he made racist comments in 1985.

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The Biden campaign last year wrote to Facebook asking the company to reject an ad by the PAC that it said was false, according to a CNN report.

The Trump and Biden campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

© Thomson Reuters 2020


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