After losing almost $500,000 fundraising money, Joe Biden blamed Facebook for advertising issues on social media. Biden’s team claims they were prevented from running ads to promote donations. Facebook took the responsibilities for certain technical issues this Thursday that prevented the campaigning team from promoting certain advertisements seeking donations.
The Digital director of Biden’s campaigning team stated on Thursday that they found themselves 5 whole days out of Election Day due to the technical faults of Facebook. According to him, they were not sure if the advertisements and promotions would run properly at the correct time. He insisted that this would not only pull them back but also their opponents are being given an advantage unfairly.
On the other hand, Facebook said that both the presidential campaigns were affected due to the technical glitches. CNN also tried to reach out to the campaigning team of President Trump to get their statement on the situation.
Role of Facebook in Joe Biden’s campaign
Both of the campaigning teams depend a lot on social media platforms like Facebook for promotions and advertisements. They have used this virtual platform largely to seek support and donations for their respective parties. Both the parties have spent a sound amount of money on Facebook this very year.
Facebook as a social media platform is playing a very crucial role in Biden’s campaigning this year. It is also making way for politicians to practice certain kinds of falsehoods in the different political advertisements they are promoting on Facebook. According to Biden, this particular situation is giving Trump and his party an advantage.
However, on Thursday, Facebook issued a clarification on its behalf. The popular social media platform strongly claimed that no advertisement or promotion was being rejected by any individual. They also asserted that in no way were they trying to show any kind of partiality towards any political organization in any manner. Instead according to Facebook, they had a particular reason why the technical troubles occurred. They said that the errors happened due to certain changes in the policy by the company, regarding political advertisements before the elections began.
In September the company declared that the new political ads would be limited in the last week of the campaigning. Therefore this would give the new political opponents and organizations check their facts and challenge their political counterparts because Facebook as a medium does not hold any accountability of the assertions made by any political personnel.
The automated systems of Facebook got severely messed up due to these changes that took place in the policies regarding political advertisements. Facebook also said some of the problems happened because the campaigners did not comprehend the newly set rules of the company regarding the political ads. According to Flaherty, on behalf of Joe Biden and the Democrats, though it is still uncertain if Facebook is promoting Trump and his party, it is clear that Facebook had no preparations to deal with the elections despite having plenty of time to do so.
