I see a lot of calls here for facebook to follow suit. I run a facebook advertising agency and use their tools every day (including the political advertising tools) and would like to offer some perspective on the potential nuances here.
When I run an ad on facebook, if the ad contains "issues of national importance" that ad is subject to the same rules as political advertising. From facebook, this includes any ads on the following topics:
-civil and social rights
-crime
-economy
-education
-environmental politics
-guns
-health
-immigration
-political values and governance
-security and foreign policy
Some examples of ads that I have run and had personal experience with that would then be banned if facebook enacted a similar ban:
-Ads for any non-profit or charity dealing with the environment. This would include ads raising money to combat de-forestation in the amazon, setting up marine sanctuaries, or ads about drilling rights in the arctic (all ads I have seen recently or worked on creating)
-Any ads about women's rights or reproductive rights. This includes any ad for planned parenthood, or similar organizations. Also includes ads for charities that raise money to support women's rights in other countries.
-Ads for charities raising money to support refugees in Greece. In fact, every ad for every charity that does basically anything would be banned. These charities deal with issues that are inherently political: the environment, reproductive rights, human rights...the list goes on.
So if facebook banned all this advertising on it's platform, what were going to end up with is a situation where the internet (for all intents and purposes, for millions of people "the internet" is essentially facebook) is a place totally devoid of anything that is not a strictly commercial enterprise. Selling T-shirts is ok, raising money for charity is not OK. Maybe this is the boundary we want to collectively set.
Also, saying that this is only for paid reach specifically is not really fair. Paid reach is the only kind of reach that actually exists for all intents and purposes on these platforms. It's a pay to play market.
If you ban all political ads, you are also banning anyone from advertising anything that deals with "issues of national importance" and this will hit charities (and anyone with a message that is not strictly commercial) particularly hard.
We work with personalities who want to sell T-shirts with political messages on them, for example. Those will now be banned. We work with a yoga studio that wants to highlight their commitment to full time employment for their employees. Those ads would be banned. We work with an author who writes about abortion. Ads for her book would be banned.
Is this the kind of platform we want facebook to be? Like it or not, facebook is how millions of people engage with the world. I don't want to live in a society that is so afraid of political speech that we have to ban everything that might hurt us. Let us decide for ourselves what to believe. Are some lies going to get through? Yeah they will. But that's the consequence of allowing more "free speech" on a platform. Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want. They have no obligation to uphold free speech. Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg understands that banning these things sets a dangerous precedent, and I only hope that he is able to defend his decisions and explain his reasoning.
Because the alternative to allowing some lies to get through in ads is much much worse.