Facebook to publicly track political sponsored content after paid Bloomberg memes
- Facebook has added a new column to its social media tracking tool to show sponsored content for candidates ahead of the US presidential election
- The move comes after Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign started paying popular meme accounts on Instagram to post content
Facebook will provide a way for people to track political sponsored content on Facebook and Instagram ahead of the US presidential election, it said on Thursday.
The move comes after US Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign started paying popular meme accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram to post content as part of its social media offensive ahead of the 2020 election.
Earlier this month, Facebook said it would allow US-based political candidates to run sponsored content on its social networking platforms, but that the content would not be catalogued in its overall public ad library.
Bloomberg’s campaign, which is running a highly-funded digital offensive to try and beat Republican President Donald Trump in November, has been working with a collective of influential meme-makers called Meme 2020 to post sponsored content on Instagram accounts over recent weeks.
To be shown in the new CrowdTangle column, influencers will have to use Facebook’s branded content tool, which allows them to more clearly tag in an official sub-header that the post is a paid partnership.