An ad on Facebook from an organization started by Republican operatives who oppose President Trump was found to have “partially false” information.
The Lincoln Project released a video earlier this week titled “Mourning in America” that criticizes Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ad, which plays off of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign ad that opened with the line, “It’s morning in America,” accuses the president of “bail[ing] out Wall Street, but not Main Street.”
The ad now has a warning label that reads, “Partly False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”
In explaining the label, Facebook said, “The information in this post is a mix of true and false statements or it could simply be incomplete. In some cases, the information is misleading.”
The anti-Trump political group that Trump attacked after the ad was released argued that their ad was being censored by the president’s “allies” at Facebook.
“Donald Trump’s allies at Facebook are censoring our ‘Mourning in America’ ad with a ‘fact check.’ They don’t want American voters to see this ad. Pitch in now to fight back and make sure it airs in every single swing state possible,” they wrote on the platform.
Facebook is not the one that conducts fact-checks.
In accordance with their policy on fact-checking content, the social media platform identifies potentially misleading or inaccurate information and passes it along to one of their fact-checking partners. The independent fact-checkers then review and rate the validity of the story, and Facebook determines what course of action should be taken from there.
Facebook’s warning on the ad includes a link to Politifact’s fact-check of the ad, which determined it to be “false.” The website said the ad is misleading because it implied the CARES Act didn’t support small businesses. Politifact also noted that the ad “ignores that the efforts were also backed by virtually all congressional Democrats.”
