San Francisco: Facebook has removed several advertorials run by US President Donald Trump's re-election campaign which were promoted as 2020 US census ads.
The social networking giant said the action was taken to "prevent confusion around the official US census" which begins from March 12.
"This survey is ESSENTIAL to our team's 2020 campaign strategy. We need Patriotic Americans like YOU to respond to this census, so we can develop a winning strategy for YOUR STATE," some of the ads read.
The questions on the survey include asking users about their views of President Trump as well as their age, name, and contact information. The survey asked people if they "think Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left are putting their personal anti-Trump agenda ahead of what's best for the American people".
Facebook said that there "policies in place to prevent confusion around the official US census" and "this is an example of those being enforced". The social media giant has often been criticised by the Democrats for not fact-checking ads run by politicians especially by the Republicans.
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House Speaker Pelosi also slammed Facebook for allowing the Trump campaign to run the ads, calling the advertisement "an absolute lie". The US census has political implications as it is used to determine the number of seats each state holds in the House of Representatives.
Facebook has come under fire for not taking down political ads with fake information but it said it would take stringent actions on misinformation about the 2020 US census.
"We have to be more vigilant about protecting against census interference across posts and ads on Facebook and Instagram and help promote an accurate count of every person in the country," said Kevin Martin, vice president of the US Public Policy and Samidh Chakrabarti, director of product management, civic engagement.
The social networking giant introduced a new advertising policy last December that prohibits ads that portray census participation as useless or meaningless or advise people not to participate in the census.
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration last summer from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 questionnaire. The administration had said the question was being added to aid the Justice Department in enforcing a law that protects minority voters' access to the ballot box. But the high court said the administration's justification for the question seems to have been contrived.
(With inputs from AP, IANS)
