This post was made 11/2/2018.
The news network Vice did a test on Facebooks ad verification by buying ads that seem to support 100 sitting U.S. senators. These ads had a statement that stated “Paid for by *insert U.S. senator here” at the beginning of every ad.
The Vice news team tried to see if they could buy political ads under the senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Vice news got approval for their fake political ads on Facebook with almost no problems at all.
This “paid for by” system doesn’t seem to work to well if a team of journalists from Vice news can easily make fake news on Facebook. I can imagine there are people have already started abusing this system and using it for their own malicious purposes. Can you imagine if a well organized group of hackers could do with this easily manipulated system? (If they haven’t already.) They could have ads that could malicious links, there could be ads that are political propaganda, there could even be ads for radical extremists groups if Facebook doesn’t monitor itself well enough.
Facebook needs to make itself more secure and less accessible from outside sources. If you want to run any sort of political ad, heck even regular ads, you should have to be verified as a citizen of the U.S. before you can even do that. Facebook needs to start taking stuff like this seriously because if they don’t they will soon find themselves with a website that they no longer have control of.
Source: Vice News Tests Facebooks ad system and Finds a Huge Flaw
Cyberleech 