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Added on the 02/11/2017 20:03:30 - Copyright : Wochit
Facebook temporarily paused its nationwide ban on political advertisements. This was to allow campaign messages about the Georgia senate runoffs. Facebook abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, according to Gizmodo. The news came via a blog post that the ban would resume following the election’s conclusion. Any ads about the Georgia runoff elections have been paused. Advertisers are not currently able to create new ads about social issues, elections, or politics.
Jordan Nabigon is the CEO of the content curation site Shared. He was a big Facebook customer, spending nearly $46 million in ads on the site. That is, until the platform booted him without warning or explanation. According to Business Insider, Facebook says Shared violated the site's terms and conditions. However, it wouldn't explain what the violations were. Nabigon says several of Shared's pages have been unpublished since October 26, taking 21 million of the company's followers with them. He added that Facebook gave him no warning that they could or would unpublish his pages, and that Facebook told him the decision was final. Business Insider reports Facebook has also locked Nabigon out of his personal account.
Facebook has announced plans to hire 1,000 employees to review ads, in an effort to keep Russia and other countries from using the social media platform to interfere in elections. Facebook said last month that it found evidence that Russian entities bought approximately 3,000 political ads in the U.S. in the months leading up to and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Facebook also said Monday that it will invest in software to flag and take down ads automatically.
The United States says that a Russian ban on US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows Moscow's efforts to deny open information. "It is quite clear that they do not want their people to have information about what the Russian regime does abroad, what the Russian regime does to its own people," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller tells reporters. SOUNDBITE
Images show Evan Gershkovich leaving court after his detention was extended by two months. Gershkovich, an American Wall Street Journal reporter is being held in Moscow on espionage charges which he denies. The court hearing was attended by representatives of the U.S. Embassy in Russia. He was arrested during a reporting trip at the end of March last year in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted. IMAGES
The United States says that Russia rejected a new proposal to free two detained Americans, Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan. "We have made a number of proposals, including a substantial one, in recent weeks," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller tells reporters. "That proposal was rejected by Russia," he says. SOUNDBITE