Researchers explain why they believe Facebook mishandles political ads
"We can do a lot better," said Laura Edelson, lead author of a new study on Facebook's ad program. "This is not the state of the art of content moderation, or detection of problematic content."
Facebook has worked for years to revamp its handling of political ads â but researchers who conducted a comprehensive audit of millions of ads say the social media company's efforts have had uneven results.
The problems, they say, include overcounting political ads in the U.S. â and undercounting them in other countries.
And despite Facebook's ban on political ads around the time of last year's U.S. elections, the platform allowed more than 70,000 political ads to run anyway, according to the research team that is based at the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy and at the Belgian university KU Leuven.
Their research study was released early Thursday. They also plan to present their findings at a security conference next August.
