These questions are absurd, but such is the current orchestral movement of the US republic. Curious if anyone actually takes things like this seriously, because I always view them one of two ways. 1) it's just theatre, to look "tough" against the big bad Social Media guy or 2) they actually believe what they're saying and they want to unironically become the Arbiter of Truth.
Will ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS... run false ads? No, they won't and in fact it's always amusing to seem the candidates' statements at the end of the ad saying that they approve those messages. Moreover, above ads target a broad area, so false ads will be caught and flagged pretty quickly.
In Facebook, I believe that is not a requirement, or perhaps not an enforced/verified requirement, and on top of that it allows running of highly targeted ads - which means you can run as many fake ads as you want and no one would be the wiser. So, the overall impact is much much larger.
So, the questions are very valid, whether something will come out of this is a whole different issue.
Yeah, politicians never lie, right? Of course they "approve" their own message. That line is about as worthless as you can get. It's not binary... there are shades of truths (and falsehoods) in almost every political advertisement.
No, there are straight up lies being told and that is the problem. The belief that a well informed electorate is the best defense is turning out to be not true. There are a lot of people who will believe lies and they will really believe lies that are repeated.
Just because a politicians tells a lie in public does not mean we should allow that same lie to be repeated over and over again. Especially true of lies that can be specifically targeted to a very narrow audience on Facebook.
There's simply no reason why Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media company needs to be involved in the business of political campaigns. They're completely free to decline such business and refuse to run political advertisements. It's not like they'd lose much: the income they earn from political ads is a drop in the bucket, proportionally speaking.
Given the intense amount of scrutiny they're under, and their apparent inability to make clear, consistent, and sensible rules regarding their content, perhaps it would be better for them to just get out of the business altogether.
