Facebook approved five obviously fake Australian election ads. Can we trust them to police the poll?

PhD scholar and Reset Australia’s Director of Technology Policy Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran says Facebook is still approving advertisements with explicit disinformation as Australia’s federal election campaigning ramps up.

In an experiment sought to test Facebook’s ad review system by attempting to approve advertisements that explicitly promoted election disinformation, Dhakshayini says the experiment shows that Facebook’s ad review system is a risk for the upcoming election.

“The spread of information intended to manipulate and deceive is nothing new. But at no other point in history has anyone had the ability to reach people at the scale available through social media.”

Read the full article from Crikey and the policy memo by Dhakshayini and Dylan Williams here.