New Facebook Political Ad Policy for Election Week 2020

10/7/20

Breaking News: Facebook just announced:

“We plan to temporarily stop running all social issue, electoral or political ads in the US after the polls close on November 3, to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse. We will notify advertisers when this policy is lifted.”

9/24/20

After we first published this many of you followed up with questions and now we have additional information we can share.

1. The policy will be in effect beginning at 12:01 AM Pacific time October 27 until 11:59pm Pacific time November 3rd. Your ad must have delivered at least one impression by 12:01 am Pacific time October 27 or else it will be permitted to run that entire week at all. There will be no exceptions so don’t bother asking.
2. This does not mean that if your ad is created by 12:01am 10/27…it means the ad must have already been approved and be actively delivering impressions.
3. Remember, it can take at least 4–5 days to get authorized as a political advertiser, 24 hours to get a disclaimer approved and up to 72 hours to get an ad approved. Do not, repeat do not wait until October 24 to start scrambling to do any of this. We are recommending ensuring that you are as an individual authorized and your page is verified with disclaimer approved no later than October 15. The close we get to that October 27 deadline the greater the chance things won’t be approved in time.
4. Additionally we are recommending you create and schedule your ad content no later than October 20th because again, the closer we get the longer it could and likely will take for things to get approved. We are also recommending that you schedule your ads to begin running by noon on the 26th so that the ads are out of the learning phase and actively delivering by 1201 am pacific on the 27th just to be safe.
5. You can go in and pause an ad that is already running with the following caveat:

If you make any changes (see #s 6 & 7 right below this short list for the full list of what you can and can’t do during that week) it will cause the ad to go thru the approval process again and we repeat that can take up to 72 hours AND if you get disapproved you have to appeal etc. Meaning if you pause an ad, change something you’re allowed to change and then unpause the ad on say November 2nd you are playing with fire and chances are good your ad will not restart in time for election day. Again, there will be no exceptions made to any of this so don’t take a chance and then email us on Nov 2nd upset that your ad hasn’t restarted right away.

6. Here is a list of things you can change about your ad between 1201am pacific 10/27 and 1159pm pacific 11/3:

• Pause and unpause ads (again as long as the ad delivered impressions before 1201am Pacific on 10/27)
• Change the scheduled end day/time for your ad
• Change your bid amount
• Change your budget
• Change targeting including a new custom and/or lookalike audience

Again we will reiterate, making any of the above changes will cause the ad to have to get reapproved to run and that approval can take up to 72 hours.

7. Here is the list of things you can not do:

• Change ad creative in any way shape or form including:

Editing or uploading new video assets

Editing or uploading new image assets

Editing or changing the text of the ad

Editing the url used in the ad

Boost a new organic post

• Run the ad from a new ad account
• Change your conversion tracking for the ad
• Change optimization
• Change bid type
• Remove or change the Disclaimer
• Edit placement
• Duplicate and start fresh

A few other reminders:

Ads that are voter education or information about voting are in fact political ads.

The content of the ad is what is used to determine whether an ad is political. Remember the definition of a political ad is not just about electoral politics, it is also content about social issues which is defined as “issues that are heavily debated and highly politicized, topics that are politically sensitive that can influence people and could potentially impact the outcome of an election or result in legislation”.

Content that is at all misleading about voting: wrong dates, times etc will be a violation of the ads terms of service and will cause the ad to absolutely be rejected.

One additional question we’ve seen is about what happens if (really when) we don’t have results by 1159pm pacific on November 3rd. That has not yet been addressed beyond the statement that Facebook has made saying that ads that claim victory before results are official will be rejected.

Still have questions? Message us and we’ll see if we can help.

Here is the post we wrote the day this policy was announced:

By now you’ve probably heard the news: Facebook announced this morning that they are going ban the creation of new political ads from October 27 through Election Day.

Confused about what that means in practicality? We’ve got you covered. Not sure how that might affect your GOTV facebook ad strategy? We’ve got you covered there as well.

First, what exactly does this mean?

Starting October 27, 2020 no new political (as defined by Facebook so anything that would get the political ad check box) can be created through Election Day.

Ok so we can’t run ads that week?

No, you can run ads but with the following caveats:

1. In order for an ad to run that week it must be actively running and delivering on October 27. Remember, if you aren’t already authorized for political ads it can take up to a week for that to process through, the page has to get verified, disclaimers need to be approved which can take up to 24 hours and it can take up to 72 hours for an to actually be approved and start delivering. In other words, don’t wait until October 26th to create your GOTV week ads! We recommend getting your ads into the approval pipeline by about October 15th if not sooner just to be safe.
2. Once your ad is running there are things you can and can’t do.
3. What you can do:

• Pause existing ads (note: some folks asked us about this earlier today so let this be our correction to the original answer we gave!)
• Unpause paused ads as long as they delivered an impression before October 27
• Edit the schedule (e.g. new end date)
• Edit the bid amount
• Edit the budget
• Edit the targeting, e.g. geographic or demographic changes, change the interests, upload a new custom audience and create a lookalike

Note: Editing the targeting will send the ad back through ad review. Advertisers may wait up to 72 hours for political/issue ads to be reviewed.

1. What you can’t do:

• Edit or upload new video assets
• Edit or upload new image assets
• Edit or provide a new landing page
• Edit or provide a new caption
• Create a promoted post ad on an organic piece of content
• Change ad objective
• Change the Page the ad is running from
• Run ad from a new ad account
• Change the conversion tracking
• Change the optimization
• Change the bid type
• Remove the disclaimer
• Edit the placement
• Duplicate the ads

Ok so what exactly does this mean?

The tl:dr is your ad must be delivering on October 27. Once it is delivering you can pause it and unpause, you change the budget and targeting but you can not change the creative,

So what would you recommend we think about as we adjust our GOTV ad strategy:

We have a few thoughts we can share:

1. Think carefully about the language in your ad. Yes you can technically start an ad, have it run Oct 27, manually pause it then unpause it on election day (keyword: manually- you can’t automate unpausing) but you don’t want to say “Go Vote TODAY because where you are running the ad for may not have early voting going on at that time.
2. Create and schedule your ads as soon as you can. With that new “deadline” we would guess that starting about 72 hours out there’s going to be a lot of ad creation happening and it won’t be good enough to have your ad in the approval process come Oct. 27, it must be delivering. Repeat: do not wait until the last minute to set up your ads!

We hear a lot of people sounding alarms about this policy change, including that, let’s be real about it, it doesn’t actually solve the problem of misinformation on the platform since most of that happens organically and via groups so let’s not pretend otherwise. This calls to mind a few potential scenarios that we are already thinking about and welcome others’ inputs on:

First, there’s nothing to stop anyone from creating ads in advance to start running say Oct. 28 when there’s nothing we can do in our own ads to fight back against any smears. While Facebook says they will continue to crack down on ads with voting related misinformation and COVID related misinformation along with ads tying the 2 together, there’s nothing to stop out and out smears like the deep fake videos we’ve been seeing. So how do we plan for that you ask?

Our initial thought is to create ads that are generic like “are you seeing the latest- click here to see the truth”…generic enough to point to say a blog home page with prominent links to updated posts of truth. Said ads can be paused and unpaused as needed. (We know this isn’t perfect or even close to ideal, we’re just trying to strategize around the hand we’ve currently been dealt).

There’s also nothing to stop right wing news outlets like Breitbart who have been exempted from the political ads rules from doing what they do best. To us, the solution is about the creation of social champion teams pronto, though truthfully to really do that right it’s really kind of too late for this cycle but there’s still no better time to start than right now. (If you’re wanting help to figure out what to do, drop us an email at training@beckerdigitalstrategies.com — we have a little capacity for some short term projects and this is important enough to get high on our priority list.)

Lastly, as folks often say, it’s always best to not put all of your eggs in one basket. When it comes to political ads online we are in fact limited in platform choices but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t run ads, we should also be doing things like text/phone banking etc as long as we are doing it safely.

If we hear any updates or clarifications on this policy change we wll update this post as appropriate.