One thing to note: this only applies to politicians. It seems normal people and political groups can't post false political ads. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-tec...
The whole discourse around this is poisoned. I have literally watched people completely flip their principles in mere minutes, just to keep condemning Facebook.
Does an ad for an abortion clinic count? How about an ad asking for donations for Palestine? Or Hong Kong? Or wall construction? How about an ad that only points out that stocks have gone up, along with a picture of Donald Trump and a flag in the background?
Obviously this falls prey to the classic problem, which is that every partisan sees messages that benefit the other side, even incredibly indirectly, as insidious manipulation, while dismissing outright propaganda from their own side as “just getting the truth out”.
Is the purchaser a PAC, political campaign, or someone personally running for office? Political ad.
Is the purchaser a private individual, or company? Nonpolitical.
I'm not an expert in this area but I'm fairly certain FEC and IRS already have designations on what counts as political, one could just use those.
So if an independent org ran those three ads, only the third could be considered political for election purposes.
FB has armies of content moderators and content policies to police non political speech already. Look at the controversies surrounding "no nudity/sexual imagery" > "banning/unbanning breast feeding pics" > "banning/unbanning pics of the african tribe who nurse sick goat calves back to health with human breast milk".
Its all complicated, every bit of it, and there is no reason to suggest that political content moderation is any more difficult than anything else.
FB _can_ do it, they are already doing very complex content moderation. There is nothing special about "political" speech.
Pretty surely it is. Everything can be politicized, or be perceived to be politicized by the other side. Even a breastfeeding image can become political in an election context. Will FB take down posts that laypeople send about candidates? Even the ban itself would become extremely contentious, political issue. That's a very messy situation that directly infringes on a bunch of rights from freedom of expression to association to basic voting rights.
That is entirely my point. This is actually a famous story -- something as objective and straightforward as banning nudity turned turned into a nightmare with tons of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. Politics is the most delicate, messy, complicated subject there is. Facebook obviously can come up with some policy, just like I could right now, but whatever it is, a majority of people will be pissed off.