Meta will suspend electoral ads close to the election – 09/20/2024 – Power

Meta announced this Friday (20) that it will suspend the broadcasting of political and electoral advertisements on election day and also before and after the election, as determined by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).

In previous elections, there were already restrictions on the broadcasting of boosted content on the election date. The company, however, did not implement the suspension of ads on its own, under the understanding that it would be up to the candidates to comply with the non-display rules.

This year, however, the Electoral Court approved stricter rules against platforms, including the provision that it is up to “the application provider, which sells the boost, to shut down the broadcasting of advertising”.

In practice, therefore, the announcement of the Goal means that the company intends to comply with the approved rules.

“Due to local regulations, we will suspend the broadcasting of all advertisements on social issues, elections or politics in the two days before the election, on the day of the vote and the day after the election, based on the silent period established by the Superior Electoral Court,” says the company’s note.

In 2022, in a resolution approved between the 1st and 2nd round of the election, under the presidency of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, the currently valid ban periods for the circulation of advertisements on the internet had already been foreseen — not only on election day, but also 48 hours before and 24 hours after.

This year’s resolution provided for the same deadline and explicitly tasked the platforms with the shutdown.

Since it became possible to boost content through campaigns on social media, which allows candidates to reach more people through their accounts than they would reach organically, platforms have been raking in huge sums of money by offering this service.

This year, in light of new rules approved by the TSE at the end of February, months before the election, Meta ended up monopolizing this market, being the only company that continued to offer the service for this election, through Facebook and Instagram.

Google, for example, stopped allowing political ads in Brazil in May of this year.

By means of a resolution, the TSE made it mandatory for platforms to have libraries of political electoral content advertisements, following a series of requirements established by the court.

The goal of these tools is to provide more transparency about who is paying for publications on these topics to reach more users, what they are talking about, how much is being spent and which target audience is being targeted and effectively reached.

At the moment, the company already appears as the main supplier of campaigns in the partial campaign expenditure statistics.