How To Stop Political Ads In Facebook

We’ve seen how politics can divide people and cause arguments amongst friends, family, and co-workers. If you’d rather not deal with all that political drama, especially with politicians spending a ton of money on ads in attempts to sway your vote, Facebook will actually let you turn those ads off in theior platform and here’s how to do it.

The company has recently announced that for those living in the US who don’t want to be spammed with political ads can turn them off.

This comes on the heels of earlier reports in which it seems that politicians are apparently getting away with making false claims in their ads, with Facebook largely doing nothing about it where the company argued that moderating such speeches would be considered “censorship”.

The ability to turn off ads, we suppose, would be Facebook’s workaround to it, where they will continue to allow politicians to purchase ad space, but at the same time allowing users to ignore them if they’d rather not see it.

So, now that you’ve decided you’d rather not see those ads, how would you turn them off? Simple, just follow the steps below.

How To Turn Off Political Ads In Facebook

1. On the Facebook app, tap the menu button at the bottom right corner of your News Feed
2. Go to Settings & Privacy
3. Tap on Settings
4. Tap Ad Preferences > Hide Ad Topics
5. Select Social Issues, Elections Or Politics
6. Tap See fewer ads about this topic

You can also disable these ads directly through the ads themselves if you come across them

1. Pick a political ad from your News Feed (it will be labeled as “Paid for”)
2. Tap on the Confirmed Organization button
3. Select See fewer ads about this topic

How To Turn Off Political Ads On Instagram

Political ads aren’t just limited to Facebook, they are also available on Instagram (which is owned by Facebook). So if you’d like to stop seeing political ads on Instagram as well, follow the steps below:

1. Go to your Instagram profile
2. Press the menu button
3. Go to Settings > Ads > Topics Preferences
4. Select Social Issues, Elections Or Politics
5. Tap Save

You can also disable these ads directly through the ads themselves if you come across them

1. Pick a political ad from your Instagram feed (it will be labeled as “Paid for”)
2. Tap on the Paid for by button
3. Select See fewer ads about this topic

Note that for now, the ability to turn off political ads are only limited to the US. Facebook did state that they do plan to eventually roll out the feature to other countries where similar paid-for political ads are present, but there is still no timeline on when that will happen.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Instagram