US political campaigns say that bans by Facebook and Google on political ads have hamstrung them during a crucial fundraising window ahead of the 2022 midterms
> Reminds me of how publishers put lots of eggs in the Facebook and Google basket, and then had to scramble for survival once the algorithms changed. https://twitter.com/... @opensecretsdc : The 2020 elections are over, but digital ad bans persist. This presents a challenge for low-profile campaigns looking to gain followers and donors for the 2021 and 2022 races. https://www.politico.com/... Caitlin Mitchell / @k8thegr8est : a good piece on FB and Google's stop-and-go ad bans, including some thoughts from me. These bans are hugely disruptive for national orgs, and even more troubling for small orgs and first-time candidates who are building supporter lists from scratch. 👇 https://twitter.com/... Dan Pino / @danpino : Yet these bans were exactly 0% effective at combating their stated goal of “fighting disinfo” as we saw Trump's big lie perpetuated on FB w/ nothing but a poorly worded label. The ease in which organic misinfo runs rampant on FB has a direct correlation to the 1/6 insurrection. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This complaint lands at the end of a stop-and-go cycle the platforms themselves created. Google first rattled campaigns with its limits on political ad microtargeting in late 2019, Facebook was reported weakening the research tools that track political ads as 2020 spending ramped up, and after Election Day both companies blocked political ads outright — a move Democrats said was already hurting Georgia runoff fundraising. The Politico piece shows the post-election freeze never really thawed, stretching into the early money window for 2022.
What makes it more than a scheduling gripe: researchers later concluded the bans did little to curb misinformation while disproportionately hurting smaller advocacy groups, and by late 2022 experts argued political ads on Meta's platforms no longer delivered good ROI at all. The bans are the hinge between those two findings.
First-order effects
- Low-profile 2021 and 2022 campaigns lose their cheapest follower- and donor-acquisition channel during a crucial early fundraising window, with national organizations disrupted and small campaigns hit hardest per the operatives quoted.
- Campaigns that built lists and persuasion plans around Facebook and Google targeting — a dependency dating back to Google's 2019 microtargeting limits — have to re-plan around an on-off ad switch they don't control.
Second-order effects
- The asymmetry the researchers flagged compounds: big national organizations can pivot to email, TV, and owned lists, while smaller advocacy groups and down-ballot campaigns absorb the cost of a policy that reportedly didn't curb misinformation anyway.
- The publisher playbook in the article's own framing — over-concentrating in the Facebook and Google basket, then scrambling when algorithms or policies changed — repeats with political money: campaigns and consultants begin pricing platform dependency as a risk, shifting budget toward channels the platforms can't switch off.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — bans that don't measurably curb misinformation but do suppress small-player reach, on platforms where political ads are already marginal ROI — the structural endpoint is political persuasion migrating off Big Tech entirely, with Facebook and Google ceding the campaign-ad business they once dominated.
- It also hardens the case for regulators and researchers to treat platform ad policy as a gatekeeping power over political speech, since the entities that can afford to wait out a ban are precisely the ones the policy wasn't aimed at.
The trend: Episodic political ad bans are converting Facebook and Google from default campaign infrastructure into an unreliable supplier, steadily pushing political fundraising and persuasion toward owned channels.