Facebook Update – Separates Political Branded Content to Highlight Paid Memes

Soon after announcing new rules for the use of memes by political candidates in February, Facebook has now come with next-level transparency for such usage! 

And, it is the new addition of listings. There will be a real-time list of political branded content that will highlight paid memes. 

Facebook was forced to take this action on the use of memes after the US democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign started paying the meme accounts on Facebook to post content. And, of course, we already know that social media can indeed influence the voter’s action. 

So, this newest update is in order to commission the creation of memes posted by various Instagram influencers. This means that U.S. based political candidates can run sponsored content on their social networking platforms. But, the content won’t be listed in the overall public ad library. 

CrowdTangle will show the listing as shown in this image - the entire posts will be divided into branded content from Instagram, branded content from Facebook followed by presidential candidates. This is a simplified way so that the voters can understand the difference between the organic data and the paid memes. 

But while Facebook did implement this new rule, it has refused to add the influencer posts into its Ad library. But they have surely left a significant gap in Facebook’s transparency tools.

A spokesperson for Facebook said for the meme content update - “After hearing from the multiple campaigns, we agreed that there should be a place for branded content in political discussion on our platforms.” Followed by, “We’re allowing US-based political candidates to work with creators to create content, provided that the paid partnership is disclosed.”

The prime challenge here is in tracking down and listing all the paid and branded content by influencers and also ensuring that they have implemented rules. 

This is how Bloomberg’s campaign is making progress, though the content is no way going to swing the vote. 

But the meme game can surely engage and put a significant exposure to the fans, and highly affect the votes. The CrowdTangle is the only application that bifurcates the paid or branded content with the unpaid ones.

This will surely impact a lot, as people would be able to see more transparency and be thoroughly informed about what is paid content and what is not!  

This was all about the updates made on the social media platform for this week! We will be back again with some new interesting updates making a wave and changing the perspectives of many for the social media platforms.