Snap recently confirmed it checks political ads at its social media platform, Snapchat, to ensure they are not misleading or deceptive and, therefore, enforce banning on related materials. This tactic appears to be a middle ground between Twitter's decision to ban all the political materials and Facebook's controversial tolerance of proven deception in political ads together.
During an interview on CNBC, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, said, "We subject all advertising to review, including political advertising." He added, he thought what they tried to do was to develop or create a place for political ads on their platform, specifically because they reached so many first-time voters and young people whom they wanted to be involved with political conversations. However, this Shapchat CEO emphasized, they didn't allow things such as misinformation to appear on that specific advertising.
Facebook on Hot Seat
Earlier this year, the most frequently used social media platform in the world, Facebook, permitted the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump to post an ad about Joe Biden that was baseless on its platform. This stirred criticism across Facebook's ad policies. In the months from the time, major social media networks have been questioned about their role in controlling against the misinformation and lies which political candidates said. They faced new skepticism, as well, from regulators and lawmakers over their responses.
Shortly, following the Biden Campaign that reached out to Facebook, Katy Harbath, FB's public policy director for global elections, responded, saying, "It was company policy not to fact-check political personalities." Harbath added the company's approach is grounded in its fundamental trust and confidence with a free media, political speech is already debatable the most examined speech there is. Just a couple of weeks later, Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, announced via a Twitter post that his company would ban all political ads starting Nov. 22. As of the middle of this week, there were said to have two different sets of rules for policing both cause-based and political ads on Twitter.
ALSO READ: Twitter Bans Political Ads this Month, Contradicts Facebook
Shapchat's Political Ad Business
The political ad businesses of Snapchat (and even of Twitter), are quite smaller than that of Facebook's. In the entire 2018 mid-term season, Twitter generated only $3 million with political ads. Online news reports have it that the Democratic candidates for 2020 have spent only approximately 4200,000 on Snapchat. As mentioned, the advertising business of Snapchat is substantially smaller if compared to Google and Facebook. However, the photo-sharing business gained a 50% increase in advertising "during the 3rd quarter this year, to $446 million.
Meanwhile, the Snapchat CEO says, the Snap's policy about political ads has been compared to cable TV. As a result, the policy was found to be quite more comparable to cable instead of broadcast. Under the rules of the Federal Communications Commission, broadcast TV stations cannot censor specific political ads based on accuracy issues. Cable TV networks, on the other hand, are not bound by the same policies of the Federal.
