There has been a lot of talk lately about President Trump’s use of campaign ads on Facebook. He also has a lot of supporters that place Facebook ads to help him get elected for a second time. This is not illegal. However, Facebook has created some rules where political ads are concerned. There are also many propaganda pages that support President Trump. These pages are also being closely monitored by Facebook to avoid a repeat of the Russian ad scandal that rocked the social media giant in 2016. Facebook wants to know where the people running these pages are based.
It recently came to light that a Facebook page supporting Trump called “I Love America” was operated by almost all Ukrainian people. Only one member of their staff actually lived in the United States. This was discovered by a site that does various investigations. Facebook took action and deleted the page. Ukraine is too close to Russia for Facebook to leave the page up. They do not want to be accused one again of allowing foreign groups to influence the thinking of American voters. Facebook said they will remain vigilant about such pages. However, Facebook would not have removed the page if they were not told about where the staff was based.
The page that was called “I Love America” was not a tiny page that was insignificant. On the contrary, it boasted more that one million followers. In fact, the amount of activity on the page is what caused people to start looking into who was running it. There is no question that the Trump propaganda that was being released on that site was definitely having an impact. There are many other similar pages. It is unclear how many of them are being run by people outside of the United States who have a vested interest in the outcome of the 2020 election.
Facebook has said that they have hired outside companies to monitor political propaganda sites involving candidates of the 2020 United States presidential election. It is not clear how many total people will be assigned to this task. Facebook has not revealed this info as of yet. Facebook said these companies are assigned with the job of looking into the backgrounds of certain political propaganda pages to find out if they are being operated by Americans. If not, the info about the real owners will be given to Facebook execs.
