Liberal Supporters Ignore Rules with Facebook Advertisements?
Liberal Supporters Ignore Rules with Facebook Advertisements?
November 21, 2007: The Liberal party has denied they are the source of a series of advertisements on the social networking website, Facebook that fail to display an authorisation or even a label indentifying them as an advertisement for a political party, instead they blame Liberal supporters for the effort.
University Lecturer, Julie Posetti has revealed that an advertisement depicting the infamous handshake between John Howard and Mark Latham is potentially breaching AEC advertising regulations.
The advertisement is captioned with Mark Latham’s comments likening Kevin Rudd’s politics to an episode of Seinfeld and links to the Liberal Party’s official website. Despite what is obviously a dig at the Labor party and a plug for John Howard, the Liberal party is denying responsibility and blames the advertisement on Liberal supporters.
“Those liberal party advertisements are not our advertisements, they've been put up by supporters not linked to us” said a spokesperson for the Liberal Party. “They’re just people out there in the internet who obviously feel strongly enough to pay for them”.
Thanks to the Commonwealth Electoral Act, every paid political advertisement needs to have proper authorisation. Should this act ever be breached, then “there is a protocol that needs to be followed, someone would need to provide the AEC with a complaint which also contains evidence of the fact that its a paid advertisement and that its not authorised.” said Phil Diak, Media Director, AEC.
Interestingly enough, the Greens were also running political advertisements on Facebook without authorisation, but they were clearly marked as being for the environmentally orientated party. Since being made aware of the issue the Greens have inserted a visible authorisation on their Facebook advertisements
“Once the problem was raised and we acknowledged that there were some concerns in this area we felt it was prudent to take the approach of removing them and authorising them all.” Said a spokesperson for the Greens.
The Greens spokesperson went on to explain that everything they have online is authorised now with the exception of Google Adword’s text advertisements which are a couple of words long, making it inappropriate to stick an authorisation on them.
According to AEC documents, should a complaint be made about the advertisements and be found accurate, individuals face a $1,000 fine while a party responsible for the advertisement would face a $5,000 fine.