For Georgia Senate hopefuls, Facebook ads are back
Facebook said that as of Wednesday, eligible advertisers would be allowed to place ads about the Jan. 5 senate races "in the state of Georgia only." Credit: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett/SOPA Images
With early voting underway in the hotly contested Georgia Senate runoffs and TV ads already blanketing the airwaves, Facebook decided it is a pretty good time to start up the old ad machine again.
In a Tuesday blog post, the social media behemoth said that as of Wednesday, eligible advertisers would be allowed to place ads about the Jan. 5 races "in the state of Georgia only."
That still allows for a lot of content, and money, to flow. Earlier this fall, Facebook announced a suspension of political ads as a way to fight election misinformation, after months of a deluge from candidates and interest groups up and down the ticket and across the country.
Now the ads are back, with Georgia candidates and the interest groups that care about them flooding smartphones with talk of the dangers of socialism or the crucial nature of these twin elections.
"Control of the U.S. Senate comes down to Georgia," says one new ad for Democrat Jon Ossoff.
President Donald Trump, though on his way out of the White House, is hardly in the rearview in the ad sphere.
"ALERT: We just printed 500 "TRUMP STILL MY PRESIDENT" stickers. Don’t wait, claim your sticker TODAY before it’s too late!" says a missive from GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
The return of these Facebook political ads is a reminder that even if the 2020 election is over, Americans will still be seeing plenty of ads in many forms in the coming months. Closer to home, consider that the NYC Campaign Finance board on Tuesday approved more than $17 million in matching funds to more than 60 candidates for city elections next year — including nearly $8 million for two mayoral candidates alone, Scott Stringer and Eric Adams.
LI Republicans spent months bashing the city and city Democrats in campaign ads ahead of November’s election. Now expect some spillover from NYC to Long Island TVs, too.
Mark Chiusano is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
