Facebook to freeze political ads before US presidential election

Facebook has announced that it will not take on any new political ads in the seven days prior to the US election on 3 November.

However, the firm will still allow existing ads to continue to be promoted and targeted at different users.Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the measure in a Facebook post.He said that he was “worried” about divisions in the country potentially leading to civil unrest.He added that Facebook would also label posts from candidates attempting to declare victory before the votes had been counted.The social network has faced criticism for allowing political ads to be “micro-targeted” on its platform so that they are only seen by small communities rather than debated more widely in the days after they appear.The Mozilla Foundation has claimed that this makes it easier for politicians and their supporters to parade fiction as fact and avoid being called out on it until it is too late, particularly as Facebook has previously said ads placed by candidates would not be fact-checked.The new steps could serve as a precedent for how the firm handles elections elsewhere in the future.Facebook also revealed that it would remove videos of President Trump encouraging voters in North Carolina to vote twice, which is illegal.Any videos of Mr Trump’s comments without contextualising information would be taken down, the firm said in a statement: “This video violates our policies prohibiting voter fraud and we will remove it unless it is shared to correct the record.”