Facebook often fails to recognize political advertisements, according to new large-scale research by New York University (Cybersecurity for Democracy).
Globally, the social media outlet rates 83 percent of political ads, but their importance was wrong. Sometimes they are not recognized as political advertisements, but non-political advertisements are often incorrectly labelled as political.
In 2018, Facebook came up with its own rules for “ads about social issues, elections or politics.” From now on, political ads would have a label indicating who pays for them. Facebook primarily relies on the advertisers themselves: they have to indicate whether their advertisements are about social issues, elections or politics. But not all advertisers do that: an algorithm, therefore, tries to identify the undeclared advertisements.
However, according to research by New York University, the algorithm only does this with varying degrees of success. The researchers analyzed nearly 34 million unique ads in 58 countries between July 2020 and February 2021. Of these, 4.2 million were politically oriented. Of 189,000 advertisements, the algorithm itself had to check whether it was politically oriented. At 83 percent, Facebook was wrong: in 21 percent of the cases, Facebook labelled a non-political ad as political, the other 62 percent of political ads completely missed the algorithm.
The results differ greatly from country to country. Only one per cent escapes Facebook’s algorithm in the United States and New Zealand. Malaysia scores the worst of all countries surveyed: 45 percent remains under the radar.
‘Facebook failed to detect undeclared political advertisements from almost every Belgian political party,’ says Victor Le Pochat, a doctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Globally, Facebook was very bad at distinguishing political from non-political ads. In this way, both users and advertisers on Facebook are ultimately misled: it is unclear whether an ad is actually politically charged, or ads are incorrectly removed because Facebook believes they are political.’
The researchers have formulated some recommendations for Facebook that can help ensure that the company better follows and enforces its own rules. For example, Facebook should better monitor the pages of political organizations and require them to label all their ads politically. There must also be consequences when the rules are broken, the notion of ‘political’ advertising must be clarified, and the local context of certain regions must be taken into account.
“So Facebook could take some simple steps to improve the detection of political ads,” said Le Pochat. ‘But the company has already indicated that it is not very keen on this.
