With the announcement of the 15th General Election (GE15) date yesterday, all political parties are gearing up and spreading their messages across all available social media platforms, especially Meta and TikTok, to get people to vote for them.
There are going to be a lot of advertisements related to the election on Facebook and Instagram. However, TikTok wishes to remain a platform free of all of these.
Malay Mail reported that Meta is allowing political advertising for GE15 but it must be made transparent to the public.
Roy Tan, Meta’s Asia-Pacific head of politics and government outreach, said the company took election campaigning seriously and intended to provide smaller parties, not just the big ones, access to its platform so they could interact with their supporters.
All political advertisements will be placed in an “Ad Library” so they are visible and everyone can see who commissioned such adverts, he added, in order to ensure that there are no clickbait and sensational pieces that violate Meta’s rules and regulations. This is done so that people can make informed decisions on election day.
We will also allow political advertisements to be made on Meta but we have our own ‘Add Transparency’ measures in place. The buyer of the advertisement must now authenticate their identity and location, and provide context and information on who is paying for the advertisement so that everyone can see who is behind them.
Meta, Asia-Pacific head of politics and government outreach, Roy Tan.
In Malaysia, advertisers are required to go through an authorization procedure and put disclaimers that read “Paid for by” on their advertisements. The Ad Library will also display advertisements for Malaysian elections or political campaigns so that people can know what advertisements are running, who is viewing them, and how much money was spent. This seven-year-old archive of advertising is completely searchable.
On August 2022, we covered a news where Meta detected a troll farm with the purpose of spreading false information, misleading people, criticising oppositions, and support the current government. Meta said the troll farm was allegedly connected to a Malaysian authority.
When asked about this, Roy said Meta couldn’t comment further on this, but they are working to prevent such thing from happening again.
While Meta welcomes political advertising, TikTok closed its door to politics-related stuff. Just last month, TikTok said they are banning governmental, political, and party accounts (GPPPAs), from advertising and promoting their content.
TikTok claimed that they didn’t mind it as long as the content was factual and enjoyable, despite the loss of income that would surge during an election campaign.
We’d rather invest in the system. The battle against misinformation is never ending. From an election standpoint we want to ensure we’re a credible space.
TikTok.
19 November is less than a month away so, get ready to be bombarded with political ads on Facebook and Instagram.
