Ahead of US election, Facebook gives users some control over how they see political ads

FacebookInc said on Thursday it was makingsomechanges to its approach topoliticalads, including allowingusersto turn off certain ad-targeting tools, but the updates stop far short of critics' demands and what rival companies have pledged to do.

Butaheadof theUSpresidentialelectionin November 2020,Facebookis struggling to quell criticism of its relatively hands-offadspolicies. In particular, it has come under fire after it exempted politicians'adsfrom fact-checking standards applied to other content on its network.

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Facebooksaid that in addition to rolling out a tool enabling individualusersto choose toseefewerpoliticaland social issueadsonFacebookand its photo-sharing app Instagram, it will also make more ad audience data publicly available.

In contrast, Twitter Inc bannedpoliticaladsin October, while Alphabet Inc's Google said it would stop letting advertisers targetelectionadsusing data such as public voter records and generalpoliticalaffiliations.

Other online platforms like Spotify, Pinterest and TikTok have also issued bans.

In a blog post,Facebook's director of product management Rob Leathern said the company considered imposing limits like Google's but decided against them as internal data indicated mostadsrun byUSpresidential candidates are broadly targeted, at audiences larger than 250,000 people.

"We have based (our policies) on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all," Leathern wrote.

The expanded ad audience data features will be rolled out in the first quarter of this year andFacebookplans to deploy thepoliticaladscontrolstarting in the United States early this summer, eventually expanding this preference to more locations.

Another change will be to allowusersto choose to stopseeingadsbased on an advertiser's "Custom Audience" and that will apply to all types of advertising, not onlypoliticalads.

The "Custom Audiences" feature lets advertisers upload lists of personal data they maintain, like email addresses and phone numbers.Facebookthen matches that information to user accounts and shows the advertiser's content to those people.

However,Facebookwill not giveusersa blanket option to turn off the feature, meaning they will have to opt-out ofseeingadsfor each advertiser one by one, a spokesman told Reuters.

The change will also not affect ad targeting viaFacebook's Lookalike Audiences tool, which uses the same uploadsof personal data to directadsat people with similar characteristics to those on the lists, the spokesman said.

Leathern said in the post the company would make new information publicly available about the audience size ofpoliticaladsin the company's Ad Library, showing approximatelyhowmany people the advertisers aimed to reach.

The changes follow a New York Times report this week of an internal memo by seniorFacebookexecutive Andrew Bosworth, who told employees the company had a duty not to tilt the scales againstUSPresident Donald Trump's re-electioncampaign.

Bosworth, a close confidant of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg who subsequently made his post public, wrote that he believedFacebookwas responsible for Trump'selectionin 2016, but not because of misinformation or Trump's work with Cambridge Analytica.

Rather, he said, the Trump campaign usedFacebook's advertising tools most effectively.