Facebook promises to better screen its Ads

In the wake of a scandal about advertising bought by Russia, Facebook says it's going to do a better job at screening its ads. But conservatives suspect that just means censorship in favor of the left.

Tech writer John Quain says we may need to regulate social media they way we regulate broadcasters.

"Can we trust 'em to actually look at all these ads? It seems almost impossible to do that. There are simply too many of these ads; it takes too long to watch or look at every one of them."

Facebook says it runs tens of billions of ads each year.

Kristy Gillentine at Houston's Drive West Communications says Facebook can potentially be a more effective advertiser than TV or radio.

"We trust information more when it comes from our friends and family, which is who we're interacting with on Facebook."

Gillentine says Facebook is influential.

"And that's one of the reasons it's so easy for misinformation to just spread like wildfire on Facebook because we're passing it among our family and friends and that's people we trust."

Quain wonders if Facebook can really change.

"Companies like Google and Facebook don't have that many humans actually looking at things; if they can run an algorithm to do the same task, they're going to do that."

Facebook says it will manually screen its ads and correct misinformation, but conservatives worry the ultra-liberal Facebook will simply screen out ads that disagree with the left.


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