Facebook considering limits on targeted campaign ads

Facebook is considering restricting politicians' ability to use highly detailed demographic and personal information to narrowly target would-be voters with ads, policy chief Nick Clegg confirmed in a possible shift in the social network's broadly permissive policy on political advertising. Clegg declined to discuss any other changes, saying the company is still in the decision-making process. But he said Facebook is also looking at "whether users are sufficiently aware of when they’re being exposed to political ads as opposed to organic content," the company's term for material such as ordinary users' posts. “We’re now working actively to reflect, in the face of all the criticisms, on what we should do to adjust our own posture on all this. We want to get this right,” Clegg said. "It's actually quite a good thing in the long run that we're having this debate now rather than two months before the election." Clegg reiterated that, even amid the policy tweaks Facebook is mulling, it won't be following Twitter's lead to block political ads entirely. "We don’t think getting out of political ads altogether is the answer," he said, arguing that Twitter's approach has a "ton of downsides," such as the difficulty of determining what counts as a political or issue ad and the disadvantage some argue such a ban places on non-incumbent politicians.