On Wednesday, Teen Vogue published what looked like an article about Facebook’s efforts to safeguard political speech. The article’s glowing tone and lack of byline led some on Twitter to speculate that it was sponsored content produced to promote Facebook.
They were right. It wasn’t news — it was an ad, paid for by Facebook.
The ad eventually was taken down, and the resulting debate about Facebook and media ethics made Teen Vogue a trending topic on Twitter.
While the ad was still up Wednesday morning and masquerading as a 2,000-plus-word article, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, shared the Teen Vogue story.
“Great Teen Vogue piece about five incredible women protecting elections on Facebook,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page. Her self-congratulatory post applauded the company’s attempts to “stop the spread of misinformation” and “fight foreign interference and voter suppression.”
Soon after posting the piece, Teen Vogue added a line at the top in italics saying it was a paid ad: “Editor’s note: This is sponsored editorial content.”
Then Facebook denied that it was sponsored content, saying it was just a regular article. The line disappeared. Then the article disappeared completely. You can find an archived version of the original article here.
Why wasn’t there disclosure from the start?
The headline of the article was, “How Facebook Is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election” and included interviews with five female Facebook managers. They said the platform was taking steps to avoid spreading misinformation and propaganda as another presidential election approaches.
The women were credited with creating a new ad library to ensure transparency and partnering with third party fact-checking organizations.
Sarah Schiff, product manager of business integrity, talked about how she plans to mediate fake ads. “Before posting an ad that could influence public opinion around elections, advertisers submit an identity document to confirm that they are who they say they are,” Schiff said. “There’s no place for anonymous political advertising on Facebook.”
Condé Nast, the owner of Teen Vogue, apologized in a statement, New York Times reported: “We made a series of errors labeling this piece, and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We don’t take our audience’s trust for granted, and ultimately decided that the piece should be taken down entirely to avoid further confusion.”
Finally, Facebook issued another statement, saying that it thought it was an editorial story, but there was a “misunderstanding”. “We had a paid partnership with Teen Vogue … Our team understood this story was purely editorial, but there was a misunderstanding,” they said.
Twitter users weighed in.
“What an I ncredible backfiring gaffe, especially as it’s on the subject of disinformation,” Gaming In The Wild tweeted.
“#SherylSandberg is a fake feminist, just another con job,” readingrenee tweeted.
Facebook has a reputation problem after three years of data privacy and election interference issues. Civil rights groups and lawmakers say the company seems unprepared to deal with the disinformation campaigns that sought to interfere with the 2016 presidential campaign.
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Facebook has used a similar ad format in the past to promote itself.
Business Insider reported in April 2019 that Facebook paid The Daily Telegraph to run positive stories defend itself from criticism over terrorist content, online safety, cyberbullying, fake accounts, and hate speech.
“Fake news, cyberbullying, artificial intelligence — it seems like life in the internet age can be a scary place,” the articles said. “That’s why Telegraph Spark and Facebook have teamed up to show how Facebook and other social media platforms are harnessing the power of the internet to protect your personal data.”
Yaël Eisenstat is the former head of elections integrity at Facebook. She worked on political ads at Facebook and wrote about it in a Washington Post perspective piece.
“Most users do not differentiate organic content from ads,” Eisenstat wrote. “… so why did we expect users to understand that we applied different standards to different forms of content that all appear in their news feeds?”
