Biden campaign slams Facebook after thousands of ads blocked by its pre-election blackout

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The Biden campaign slammed Facebook on Thursday night after thousands of ads were blocked due to a technical glitch in the platform's pre-election ban on political ads.

Facebook announced last month that it would ban new political advertisements in the week leading up to the Nov. 3 election in an effort to combat misinformation about voting.

The temporary ban went into effect on Oct. 27, but the platform said it ran into “a number of unidentified issues” that caused ads to be paused that have already been running on Facebook, according to a Thursday blog post. The post went on to say that the technical glitch also prevented advertisers from making permissible changes to their ads.

"We have implemented changes to fix these issues, and most political ads are now running without any problems," the blog post read.

The issues experienced on the platform have affected both Biden and President Trump's campaigns, and have cut off messaging just days before the Nov. 3 election, according to Politico. The Biden campaign said that the glitch has caused the campaign to lose half a million dollars in fundraising revenue, according to the outlet.

On Thursday night, Rob Flaherty, the Biden campaign's digital director, lambasted the company in a statement first provided to Politico, saying that Facebook has "provided no clarity" on the issues, and that it has “no sense of the scale of the problem, who it is affecting, and their plan to resolve it.”

“It is currently unclear to us whether or not Facebook is giving Donald Trump an unfair electoral advantage in this particular instance, but it is abundantly clear that Facebook was wholly unprepared to handle this election despite having four years to prepare,” Flaherty continued.

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