Facebook Gives Users Way To Report False, Misleading Advertising

As Facebook branches out by adding more features to its large social platform, it has to make sure people actually want to use those services. On Tuesday, the company announced that it added a way to leave feedback on any advertisements that users interact with, just in case there was something wrong with a product they purchased.

Facebook elaborated a bit with a post on its Newsroom blog. The site has created an “Ads Activity” page where users can see every ad they have clicked on recently. The idea is to combat ads for products that either take an unusually long time to arrive, or arrive as something other than what was advertised.

If a business receives a large amount of negative feedback from users, Facebook will reach out and try to resolve the situation. Businesses that keep getting negative feedback after this will eventually be told they cannot run as many ads as they used to. If it keeps going without improvement, that advertiser will be banned entirely.

Facebook published its guidelines for advertisers, including expectations for the accuracy of their ads, for everyone to see.

One of the major problems Facebook has encountered since it dipped its toes into e-commerce is an abundance of false or misleading advertising on products, according to TechCrunch. Sellers out of China advertise products on users’ news feeds, but when the product gets delivered, it turns out to be a low-quality knock-off.

There is at least one Facebook page where people share knock-off items for others to see.

The Ads Activity feature is the latest example of Facebook relying on users to widely report and weed out bad elements, rather than putting the onus entirely on algorithms and moderators. Back in April, Facebook rolled out a feature that tells users if a news outlet attached to an article might not be trustworthy without them having to read it in its entirety.

E-commerce is not the only way Facebook has diversified its portfolio recently. The social network launched a video game livestreaming hub last week and has a fully featured dating service on the way later this year.