Facebook bans political ads that delegitimize presidential election

Facebook expands on new rules rolled out last week to crack down on disinformation

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acebook Inc. said Wednesday it will ban certain ads that attempt to delegitimize the presidential election, a day after President Donald Trump made baseless claims during the first presidential debate that the election would be “rigged.”

“As we get closer to Election Day we want to provide further clarity on policies we recently announced,” Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern tweeted. “Last week we said we’d prohibit ads that make premature declarations of victory. We also won’t allow ads with content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of an election.

“For example, this would include calling a method of voting inherently fraudulent or corrupt, or using isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election.”

In a blog post, Facebook FB, +0.04% said the ban will also extend to ads that portray voting and census participation as meaningless or that urge users not to vote or fill out census forms.

The changes apply to both Facebook and Instagram, and take effect immediately.

The rules only apply to ads, not regular News Feed posts by Facebook users.

Trump has made numerous false claims about voting and has repeatedly questioned the integrity of mail-in ballots, despite numerous studies showing instances of fraud are extremely rare.

At Tuesday night’s debate against Joe Biden, Trump falsely claimed that mail-in voting that was already underway was “a fraud.”