Facebook forced to take 'fake news' out of TV ad
Facebook's campaign to win back the trust of the public has suffered a hiccup, after it was forced to remove the term "fake news" from a television commercial to comply with advertising guidelines.
The social media behemoth has been running commercials on TV stations and online, promoting recent changes it has made to ensure user privacy, reduce clickbait and to highlight its renewed focus on content from friends and family.
But Fairfax Media has learned the ad was amended for free to air audiences, after an industry body which advises on the classifications of ads, took issue with it.
Sources said Free TV's 'Commercials Advice' (CAD) unit told Facebook is was concerned the ad could be construed as being political in nature. Free TV is an industry body for TV networks such as Nine, Seven and Ten, and has been critical of Facebook.
Facebook and other digital giants are being investigated by the Australian competition regulator over their dominance of the digital advertising market. Facebook declined to comment on the advertisement.
CAD has been known to push back on politically contentious topics, such as advertisements with rainbows during the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017.
"Some ads were submitted and we worked with [Facebook]. There needed to be some changes," said Free TV chief executive Bridget Fair, "We have a set of rules we need to comply with."
Facebook could either keep the ad in its original form and put a disclaimer tag at the end, or make "certain changes" to it, Ms Fair said.
The changes to the TV ad relate to its voice-over, which uses the terms "fake news" and "privacy". Online versions of the ad still contain these words.
The TV versions have started running on Nine and Seven.
Facebook is embarking upon a public relations offensive, as regulatory manoeuvring around the social media giant, both in Australia and abroad, intensifies.
The company's top regional policy executive, Singapore based Simon Milner, is visiting Sydney this week to speak at an event with ACCC chairman Rod Sims, and to make the case that the company should not be regulated on competition grounds.
"We are happily engaging with [ACCC chairman] Rod [Sims] and his team to help understand our business better," he told Fairfax Media.
Mr Sims reiterated his concerns about digital platforms in a speech at the International Institute of Communications’ Telecommunications and Media Forum on Tuesday, saying the inquiry would need to look through "both a competition and consumer lens" at issues like transparency, privacy and market power.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has been particularly vocal in criticising Facebook and Google. In a 144-page, 52,000 word submission to the ACCC enquiry, released in May, it called for stricter regulations of tech giants, including the establishment of a new body to monitor their algorithms.
"We want to help the ACCC to be able to clear the wheat from the chaff and say 'fine, you are making your polemical argument, let's focus on the evidence'" Mr Milner said.
Facebook should not be punished with new regulations because of its strong position in digital advertising, Mr Milner said, which is a product of its innovation. But he conceded the company could face more stringent controls around user data and the content that is posted to the platform.
"There is a big difference between saying 'we are going to regulate you because you are dominant, and you are abusing your market power' .... [and saying] 'we need to find a way of ensuring you are accountable for how you keep people data's safe and secure, and how you are responsible around bad content - particularly things like terrorism, hate speech, child exploitation imagery" he said.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal saw data of potentially millions of Facebook users unwittingly harvested by a political consultancy with links to the Trump presidential campaign.
"We underestimated the way in which, and the scale of which, people would try to abuse our platform," Mr Milner said. "We invested almost too much in innovation, and not enough on dealing with the abuse."
Overnight, the Washington Post reported that three US government agencies - the FBI, the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission - have joined the Justice Department in investigating Facebook over the incident.
"It's up to the regulator to sort out the fact from the hyperbole, the market abuse from the healthy competition," he said.