Facebook allowed, then removed, ads soliciting donations to a fake Trump campaign page

An "obviously fake" Facebook page presenting itself as part of the Trump campaign was able to run political ads on the site unchecked, while also linking to a scam website soliciting donations, CNN reports.

It's a bad look for Facebook, which has come under increased pressure lately for its terrible stance on political advertising – a stance that can basically be summed up by the shrugging emoji, and has been publicly slammed by the company's own employees.

Established in March this year, the DonaldTrumpCampaign Facebook page featured many of Trump's talking points and rhetoric, but only seemed to have paid for ads in the past week.

The Facebook page put on a show of legitimacy, encouraging people to donate to the Trump campaign and directing people to a website to do so. However, both website and Facebook page had no affiliation with the Trump campaign, with donated funds presumably going into the pockets of a less well-publicised miscreant.

"This page violates our policies against impersonation and is not allowed on Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson told CNN after they were made aware of the page and asked for comment. "We've taken down the Page and removed the political ad authorization, which was mistakenly applied."

PayPal also shut down the account collecting donations after being contacted by CNN, and says it is investigating the matter.

DonaldTrumpCampaign had less than 100 followers and seemed to have only begun running ads over the last week, getting over 1000 views on their ads for their approximately $100 spend. It's unknown how much if any money was donated to the scam website by people directed there from Facebook, but the fact that the ads ran at all is concerning.

Currently, anybody can run a political ad on Facebook in the US provided they provide a US address and a US driver's licence, US state ID card or US passport. Though this authorisation process was ostensibly put in place to make clear where ads are coming from, this incident proves it's fairly simple to circumvent.

CNN reports the address linked to the false DonaldTrumpCampaign Facebook page was that of an LA grocery store, whose employees claimed ignorance of the page.

Facebook's leadership has continually refused to take control of political advertising on their platform despite widespread external and internal opposition, saying that they "remain committed to not censoring political speech." It continues to brandish this ineffectual excuse for a policy even when said speech is provably false or misleading, and despite being aware of the devastating impact such misinformation can have.

This milquetoast stance was recently thrown into stark relief by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the site's "complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements." Zuckerberg was unable to definitely say that lies would not be allowed in Facebook's political ads, though he did offer up the elementary school sentiment that "lying is bad."

It seems that, at least in Facebook's eyes, with great power comes great irresponsibility. Despite Zuckerberg's assertion, the company has repeatedly minimised its clear role in platforming and spreading lies. Now it can't even control where the lies are coming from.