Facebook Efforts to Thwart Fake News Trip Up Some Nonprofits

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A dozen years ago, when Todd Kniazuk started the Big Easy in Buffalo, which brings New Orleans musicians to Buffalo, N.Y., to perform and collaborate, he relied on a mix of street fliers and print and radio advertising to get the word out.

More recently, however, Facebook has become a central marketing and advertising tool for the nonprofit program, Kniazuk says, allowing him to target audiences with precision. He can focus on Facebook users based on age and location. Sometimes he directs ads exclusively to the 1,700 individuals who follow the program’s Facebook page; other times he uses highly specific characteristics like interest in Zydeco music.

So Kniazuk was surprised in early July to receive a rejection email from Facebook for an ad he submitted promoting an upcoming guest, guitarist and singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez. The content of the ad was largely identical to those he had successfully submitted to Facebook previously, save for the name of the guest.

The ad had not been approved, Facebook said in its message to him, because it “was flagged for political content.” The program would need to register with Facebook before the ad would run, marked as political.

The rejection message did not specify exactly what had been deemed political, Kniazuk says, but he inferred that language thanking government sources of support was the culprit.

There isn’t much he could do about the text. Grant-funding contracts from the New York’s Erie County and the New York State Council on the Arts requires specific acknowledgment language. And “I didn’t want people coming to the concert thinking it was a political event,” says Kniazuk, who works as a nonprofit consultant and helps run the Big Easy in Buffalo under the nonprofit Arts Services Initiative of Western New York. Moreover, “we should thank our supporters,” he says.

Pushing Accountability

New political and issue-based advertising policies at Facebook are causing minor headaches at some nonprofits. Advocacy organizations are the most affected, but even groups without public-advocacy agendas are getting tangled up in the changes, according to nonprofit leaders.

Facebook says the issue-based advertising policies, first announced in April, are designed to increase transparency and accountability for advertisers. The company has acknowledged it was slow to pick up on and react to foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“People want more transparency around political ads and who’s trying to influence them,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an email to the Chronicle. “At the same time, it’s incredibly important to verify political advertisers so we can help prevent bad actors from interfering in elections. Doing this won’t be perfect, but the important step is to start.”

Hard to Navigate

Advertisers that want to place political or issue-based ads on Facebook must first receive authorization by confirming their identity and location. That includes nonprofits. The idea is to move Facebook closer to political-ad rules under which other types of traditional media operate and ensure that political or issue-based ads are coming only from U.S. sources. The verification process takes about one week, the company and nonprofits say.

In addition, political and issue-based ads will include a “paid for by” label, and the ads are archived and accessible to Facebook users.

The policies pertain to explicit political ads, such as those for political candidates, political parties, or ballot initiatives and referendums but also to what Facebook describes as ads related to “national legislative issues of public importance.”

Its list of 20 “top-level issues” that are subject to the new policies includes health, civil rights, environment, education, guns, and poverty.

Facebook is using artificial intelligence to flag and make the initial decisions on whether to block certain ads. The company is complementing that screening with thousands of employees who are also reviewing ads.

Allen Mattison, a Washington lawyer who represents nonprofit advocacy organizations, said he appreciates Facebook’s effort to clean up problems the company allowed to fester during and after the presidential election but added that the policies are hard for groups to navigate.

Among other things, the new policies are too vague, Mattison said. What if a nonprofit is working on a big national issue at a local level? For example, he says it’s unclear whether an ad paid for by a local environmental group promoting a river clean-up day would require Facebook to verify the nonprofit under the new rules. Environmental concerns are among those top-level issues identified by Facebook as being of “public importance,” he pointed out.

The snags are something “the nonprofit community could have identified if Facebook had sought their input, as would have happened in notice-and-comment rule-making of the type undertaken by government agencies,” Mattison said in an email. “But by unilaterally announcing a policy, Facebook has created confusion among their customers.”

Delayed Ads

Joe Coakley, deputy director of online fundraising at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the nonprofit applied for the appropriate verification from Facebook as soon as the new policies took effect. Several time-sensitive ads were delayed as a result of the new processes, he said.

“Sometimes they’d get caught in approval for a day or more and we would have to cancel the ad and start again,” Coakley said in an email.

He also said that some ACLU affiliates that hadn’t yet been verified to place political or cause-based ads were also running into hurdles “but then would appeal within Facebook support and have the classification overturned manually.”

The new ad disclaimers do not appear to be having an impact on ad performance.

“I guess the impact we felt was mostly in delays at key moments,” Coakley said.

Nonprofits Targeted

Nonprofits have not been impervious to widespread information manipulation waged on social media and other websites by the Russian government in recent years. A Chronicle analysis of a database of 200,000 tweets from 2015 to 2017 linked to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, showed hundreds of mentions of nonprofits.

The Clinton Foundation was the most popular nonprofit subject of the Russian propaganda operation, appearing 622 times in the cache of 200,000 IRA-linked tweets.

Twitter has conducted purges of fake accounts. At Facebook, the new advertising policies are part of the solution, the company says. Facebook aims to hire as many as 4,000 more people to review ads. The company says it is also blocking and deleting fake accounts, doubling the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 and working with federal agencies to stay head of threats.

Surprising but Not Onerous

Kniazuk, the Buffalo nonprofit consultant, said he was partially aware that Facebook was making changes to advertising on the site.

“I had read that they wanted to make sure that if there were ads coming out of political organizations, that that was known. And I thought that was a good idea because that is consistent with TV and radio.”

But it doesn’t make sense for the arts program or the nonprofit that supports it to register as a political or cause advertiser because neither one is, he says.

After having his ad rejected in early July, Kniazuk immediately reached out to Facebook to explain why the arts-program ad was not political in nature.

“I have to do this, per the contracts with the state and the county, so please let this ad go through because I can’t change it,” Kniazuk told the company.

Soon thereafter the ad was approved. If anything, he says, he hopes that Facebook, when rejecting ads, will be specific about what parts of the ads are problematic so that nonprofit leaders will know how to adjust.

“It wasn’t like it was any kind of onerous or dragged-on process,” Kniazuk says. “The whole thing was then and gone in a couple of hours. But it was surprising.”