Facebook’s advertising integrity head quits after 4 years
Facebook’s chief of advertising integrity and director of product management, Rob Leathern, has announced to leave the company after serving at the social network for four years.
Leathern was the public face of Facebook’s advertising policies, which banned political ads shortly before and following the 2020 US presidential election.
“After almost 4 years, I made the difficult decision to leave Facebook. I’ve had a great experience in a difficult, fun, fast-growing and impactful role at the company working with amazing people,” Leathern said in one of his tweets on Saturday.
“Despite 2020’s additional bubble of uncertainty, the teams I ran or influenced did a lot of very good work, including related to the US election where a lot of work was the culmination of a huge amount of effort over several years,” Leathern noted.
In November, Leathern tweeted that Facebook did not have “the technical ability in the short term to enable political ads by state or by advertiser”.
“It’s taken years to build the infrastructure that supports the Facebook Ad Library and ensure that political ads are transparent,” Leathern said at the time.
After his tweets, Facebook lifted a temporary post-election ban on political ads in Georgia ahead of the January 5 runoff that will decide which party controls the US Senate.
Days after banning ads prematurely declaring victory in the presidential election, Facebook in October banned those questioning the US electoral process.
“We’re temporarily extending a number of measures we put in place to protect the election process. Everyone on Facebook and Instagram in the US continues to see the labels we’ve been running on candidate posts saying Biden is the projected winner,” Leathern had said.
“What’s next? While I’m not going to be working on ads directly, it will be a part of what I work on as I will be staying in the tech/data/privacy space,” he said in a fresh tweet.
