The social media giant has announced it will remove a series of ads from the US President’s re-election campaign, saying it violated its policies to “prevent confusion around the official US census”.
The Trump Make America Great Committee had posted 2,000 versions of an ad this week, asking users to respond to the ‘Official Congressional District Census’.
But instead of information at the Census Bureau, the posts linked to a push-poll survey on the Republican Party’s fundraising site action.donaldjtrump.com and asks for personal information for the campaign.
“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,” it states.
Advocates argued this could interfere with the actual census, which is due to begin in mid-March.
Facebook’s stated policy on census misinformation bans “misrepresentation of the dates, locations, times and methods for census participation.”
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has tried to influence the census, however. Trump originally prosed including a question about whether a respondent was a citizen – leading to concerns the census could be used to intimidate people related to undocumented immigrants.
