Policing Politics: Facebook and a Politician\u27s Right to Free Speech

Advancements in technology are not without their own ethical concerns. Social media technology provides for platforms which allow users to interact and exchange ideas in virtual communities. Of these Facebook is among the leaders of the pack with an estimated 2.7 billion monthly active users globally as of the second quarter of 2020 and estimated 190 million users in the United States as of October 2020. This wide reach, in combination with low cost for advertisement makes it one of the platforms of choice for Organization to promote their products, services or agenda. This accounts for why 98% of the Facebook total revenue was from advertisements. With this though presents an ethical concern, the spread of misinformation. Following the 2016 elections, investigations uncovered the Russian operative embarked on a mass campaign of spreading misinformation on Facebook to influence the American election, and this went unnoticed by Facebook. This poses a security threat America’s nationhood and clear actions need to be taken to mitigate this ethical concern. This study assesses the case study in (Hoffman 2020) and provides recommendations for Facebook to ban all political advertisement from its platform in a bid to mitigate this ethical concern on the spread of misinformation as politics is concerned