Don’t Waste Time: Facebook Stopping Targeted Political Advertisements; Time to Retain Your Voters Starts Now
With the rebranding of Facebook as Meta, the new name of the company, some incredible changes in the advertisement practices are about to happen.
Now Meta will not allow advertisers to target people based on sensitive values, including race, religion, sexual orientation, and above all, politics.
This marks a sudden shift in political advertisement practices, where politicians will no longer be able to run effective ads on the platform, as the option to target voters based on their political preference is no longer available.
What are the possible avenues for politicians amid this changing policy? Let’s see.
Facebook Ruling out the Possibility of Political Advertisements: Time for Politicians to Sort out Their Priorities
Facebook has always come under heavy scrutiny from the stakeholders, including legislatures, for promoting hate speech through its platform.
It was only a matter of time that Facebook started reconsidering its ad policies. With the rebranding of the platform as “Meta,” the company has finally decided to fix this problem.
The platform currently has the feature of targeting people based on their religious, ethnic, racial, political, and a whole lot of other choices.
This means that the advertisers could show you ads based on your choice in the above-mentioned spheres easily. However, Facebook is going to eliminate this feature.
Hence, as a politician, you can not target people based on their political preferences. This will ultimately not allow you to find your potential voters and target them on the platform.
Effectively, this seems to be the end of political advertisements on the platform of Meta.
Obviously, as a politician seeking public office, the only option you have is to find people’s political inclinations and hit them directly using ads.
But that is no longer an option. You cannot just target all the people in your locality in your advertisements because it is not a cost-effective method at all, which will drain all of your campaign resources.
The only way out for politicians now is to target their relevant audience through their own websites.
Investment in Personal Websites will Save Politicians from Chaos
Personal websites remain the most underrated option these days, and many political campaigns are even ignoring this strategy altogether.
But now, having these websites is not an option but a compulsion, as there is no other way out.
The importance of websites in the post-advertisement era can also be analyzed from the fact that they allow you to target your voters effectively without any additional cost.
This will increase the importance of search engines, as people will turn to the platforms of Google and other search giants to get information about their favorite political candidate.
This brings us to another point, i.e., reputation management. As more people would turn on these platforms to get information about your candidacy, you have no option but to mend your digital reputation.
In the past, you could have avoided the reputation crisis by paying for advertisements through social media companies, primarily Facebook.
But now, you have real reasons to worry about this, as you have no other option other than investing in your own website and search engine optimization practices to fix your candidacy.
These changes can also be attributed to the recent whistleblower efforts that blamed Facebook and Instagram for affecting the mental health of its users and causing negative experiences for people.
Facebook has often been criticized for showing anti-semitic ads and other controversial issues just because advertisers pay them.
These controversial ads ultimately result in chaos and mental health disorders among the consumers.
However, now Facebook has finally started to realize its opportunity to fix the problem once and for all.
Final Thoughts
It is high time for all the politicians to start building their own digital presence without relying on the mighty platforms with the elimination of detailed targeting options.
This stands true even with the upcoming “cookie apocalypse,” which will not allow third-party websites to target people based on the cookies present in their Google Chrome browser.
Ultimately this would also impact the digital advertisements on Google, which will rule out the possibility of any political advertisement as well.
Twitter already does not allow advertisements along political lines, which also exacerbates the need to have a website and promote it online.
