No Worries, Facebook's Content Marketers: Fake News Ads Are Gone

That fake news ad won’t be next to your content, marketers. Facebook outlawed ads from fake news pages on Monday.

For marketers who thought Facebook had already taken care of its fake news problem and ads from those pages would appear nowhere near their ads and content, Monday’s news was welcome — if a bit too long in coming.

In a Facebook Newsroom post titled “Blocking Ads From Pages That Repeatedly Share False News,” product managers Satwik Shukla and Tessa Lyons said:

Over the past year we have taken several steps to reduce false news and hoaxes on Facebook. Currently, we do not allow advertisers to run ads that link to stories that have been marked false by third-party fact-checking organizations. Now we are taking an additional step. If Pages repeatedly share stories marked as false, these repeat offenders will no longer be allowed to advertise on Facebook.

Kurt Wagner of Recode points out on Monday that Facebook emphasized that that ad revenue can come back if the advertisers clean up their acts on their pages.

Marty Swant of Adweek wrote on Monday that this ad removal is among “belated attempts” from Facebook to clean up its fake news-sharing problem:

The update is just the latest in a series of changes Facebook has made since November 2016, when it came under heavy criticism for its part in allowing misinformation to spread, which potentially played a role in influencing the U.S. presidential election.

David Cohen, also of Adweek, wrote on Aug. 3 that third-party fact-checking aids Facebook in finding related articles, too, which positions publishers and content marketers with high-quality content together. The algorithm for the Related Articles for News Feeds has had to change since Facebook first introduced this active content policing in 2013 — when the social media giant saw bad photo memes as the enemy. (Those memes haven’t gone away.)

So, even though Monday’s announcement doesn’t mean the fake news pages will go away, marketers may take comfort in knowing this from Cohen’s Aug. 3 article:

• Facebook will begin using updated machine learning to detect more potential hoaxes and share that content with third-party fact checkers.

• If an article has been reviewed by third-party fact checkers, Facebook may show stories from those fact-checkers beneath the original post.

[Product manager for News Feed Sara] Su said Facebook “will continue testing updates to Related Articles and other ongoing News Feed efforts to show less false news on Facebook and provide people context if they see false news.”

What do you think, marketers?

Please respond in the comments section below.