Facebook and Google face great criticism currently for the ability for fake news websites to promote inaccurate and misleading articles through their ad platforms. This criticism comes after a contentious presidential election season witnessed an explosive growth of ads promoting untrue information in favor of one candidate or the other.
According to Search Engine Land and Facebook’s own terms, sites that “feature illegal or deceptive content (fake news)” are now prohibited from using Facebook’s ad platform. Google’s policy updates are similar:
Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property.
It is yet unclear how effective these policy changes will be, and how long it will take the many other ad platforms to follow suit.
