Facebook to drop on-site support for political campaigns

Reuters  |  SAN FRANCISCO 

By Dave

The company and other major including Alphabet Inc's and have long offered free dedicated assistance to strengthen relationships with top advertisers such as presidential campaigns.

Brad Parscale, who was Trump's in 2016, last year called onsite "embeds" from crucial to the candidate's victory. has said that Democratic challenger was offered identical help, but she accepted a different level than Trump.

and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests to comment on whether they also would pull back support.

Facebook said it could offer assistance to more candidates globally by focusing on offering support through an instead of in person. It said that political organizations still would be able to contact employees to receive basic training on using Facebook or for assistance on getting ads approved.

first reported the new approach.

Facebook, Twitter, and served as "quasi-digital consultants" to U.S. election campaigns in 2016, researchers from the at and found in a paper published a year ago.

The companies helped campaigns navigate their services' and "actively" shaped campaign communication by suggesting what types of messages to direct to whom, the researchers stated.

Facebook's involvement with Trump's campaign drew scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers after the company found its user data had separately been misused by political data firm Cambridge Analytica, which consulted for the Trump campaign.

In written testimony to U.S. lawmakers in June, Facebook said its employees had not spotted any misuse "in the course of their interactions with Cambridge Analytica" during the election.

(Reporting by Dave in San Francisco and in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Fri, September 21 2018. 06:01 IST