Facebook won't take on any new political ads in the seven days before the US election.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

Americans will go to the polls in November, and the social networking platform has confirmed it won't be accepting new ads in the days beforehand.

The news was confirmed by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who admitted in a blog post that he was "worried" about divisions in the US leading to unrest.

The billionaire said: "We're going to block new political and issue ads during the final week of the campaign.

"It's important that campaigns can run get out the vote campaigns, and I generally believe the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims.

"So in the week before the election, we won't accept new political or issue ads. Advertisers will be able to continue running ads they started running before the final week and adjust the targeting for those ads, but those ads will already be published transparently in our Ads Library so anyone, including fact-checkers and journalists, can scrutinize them. (sic)"


Tagged in