An ad that appeared in thousands of Facebook feeds this summer featured an altered video of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, at a regular press briefing. In it, she appeared to say Americans could claim a $5,000 relief check on an official government site. An arrow that then appeared instead led to an advertiser called Get Covered Today.
Similar ads showed fabricated videos of Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts promising similar rebates that did not exist. “This is not a gimmick,” the impersonation of Ms. Warren says.
In fact, it was.
Even so, the company behind the ads and others like it were among the top political advertisers on Facebook, according to an analysis by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit focused on holding large technology companies accountable.
The ads are a lucrative part of Facebook’s advertising revenue that, the project’s researchers and others say, has led the company to turn a blind eye to a flood of low-quality or deceptive content, spam and in some cases outright fraud on the platform.
“Meta is very aware of these types of scams,” said Katie A. Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “They just didn’t care.”
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The post Spam and Scams Proliferate in Facebook’s Political Ads appeared first on New York Times.
