Facebook announces freezing of political ads before US election

Washington:Facebook announced on Thursday that it will not be taking any new political ads in the seven days prior to the US election which is scheduled on November 3.

Mark Zuckerberg revealed the measure in a Facebook post, BBC reported.

Zuckerberg said that he was "worried" about the deep divisions in the country which could potentially lead to civil unrest.He added that Facebook would also label posts from candidates attempting to declare victory before the votes had been counted.

The social network has faced criticism for allowing political ads to be "micro-targeted" on its platform so that they are only seen by small communities rather than debated more widely in the days after they appear.

The Mozilla Foundation has claimed that this makes it easier for politicians and their supporters to parade fiction as fact and avoid being called out on it until it is too late, particularly as Facebook has previously said ads placed by candidates would not be fact-checked.The new steps could serve as a precedent for how the firm handles elections elsewhere in the future.(UNI)