Publishers seek Facebook policy exemption for news

Posted June 11, 2018

Seven media organizations representing over 20,000 media publishers and professionals in over 120 countries around the world have come together to express concern over Facebook’s new advertising policy that labels quality news as political advocacy and includes such content in its political ad archive.
 

Through this most recent attempt to address vulnerabilities on the platform leading up to federal elections in the United States, Facebook will undermine journalism and its role as the fourth estate and legitimize anti-journalism narratives around the world. The groups are calling on Facebook to immediately exempt news organizations from this new policy.
 

The media organizations, which represent newspapers, television, magazines and digital natives who employ journalists across the world, today sent a letter strongly encouraging Facebook to exempt news organizations from its new policy to label and archive political advertising.
 

The organizations offer three broad recommendations as part of a process to exempt news content from the ad archive. While the recommendations in no way relieve Facebook of its responsibility for the problems created by their platform, they offer critical industry input to help identify reasonable, scalable solutions working through a coalition of associations who already spend their time thinking about these issues