Troubleshooting disclaimers for ads about social issues, elections or politics in the United States

We have compiled answers to the most common topics surrounding disclaimers, to help you establish a disclaimer for your organisation. Use this blog to troubleshoot any issues you may run into when setting up your disclaimers, and/or managing ads about social issues, elections or politics.

1. Your Page needs a disclaimer to run ads about social issues, elections or politics. Please note: This policy applies to a broader range of influential content than traditional campaign ads, and is based on the content of the ad, regardless of the type of advertiser.

• For examples of the types of ads that fall into the ads about social issues, elections or politics special category, please review this Help Centre article.
• You can get started with the disclaimer creation process in your Page's settings.

2. The person creating the disclaimer and/or launching and managing the ads needs to be authorised to run ads about social issues, elections or politics on their personal profile.

• Visit www.facebook.com/id to get started with your authorisation to run ads about social issues, elections or politics.

3. There are multiple paths to getting a disclaimer established for your organisation. These paths are not intended to categorise the type of organisation you have, and are simply different options to complete the process based on the documentation you may have available. Should you choose to go with the EIN route (also known as the "tax flow" route), you'll need to submit IRS documents as proof of eligibility for your organisation's disclaimer: these documents need to be from the IRS (such as, but not limited to, form CP 575), not ones you may have submitted to the IRS (e.g. W9).

• You can see the multiple paths to getting a disclaimer approved for your organisation here.
• You can see the full list of accepted documents here.

4. The website associated with your disclaimer needs to be live and representative of the organisation listed on your disclaimer when you submit the disclaimer for approval, and needs to remain live otherwise the disclaimer will get deactivated. The exact organisation name listed on your "Paid for by" disclaimer must appear on the home page of the website provided, or the disclaimer will be rejected.

5. Pages that run ads about social issues, elections or politics in the United States must assign a Page owner. Learn how to assign or change a Page owner here.

6. Don't forget to link your disclaimer to the ad account you plan to run ads from. This will give you the option to label your ads about social issues, elections or politics with the linked disclaimer. If you do not do this, your ads will be rejected.

• Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

7. Just because a disclaimer is linked to the ad account does not mean it's an approved disclaimer: always check that the disclaimer that is showing as linked at the ad level of Ads Manager is still valid. You can do this by visiting your page's settings to review the disclaimer(s) your page has, or submit a new one for approval if needed.

8. When creating your ads, don't forget to select the ads about social issues, elections or politics special category at the campaign level. This effectively attaches your approved and linked disclaimer to the ads.

• Instructions on how to create ads about social issues, elections or politics here.

9. We are unable to expedite the disclaimer review process or your authorisation to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, regardless of circumstances.

10. Using a disclaimer on your ads does not result in the algorithm showing your ads less.

11. Joint disclaimers are allowed (e.g. Paid for by Samantha Weber and Sofia Torres).

• Follow the instructions for Option 4 on this page.
• The landing page behind the URL that you submit in the disclaimer submission process will need to reflect that the ads are paid for by two entities.

12. If your organisation wants to run ads in a country that it isn't based in but requires a disclaimer to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, you'll need to have a Page admin in the target country get authorised to run ads about social issues, elections or politics.

• Once they're authorised, they will be able to create a disclaimer for your Page to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, in that country.
• They will also need to be the ones to launch the ads about social issues, elections or politics in the target country using the disclaimer they created.
  • Once launched, your campaign cannot be edited by anyone not authorised to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, in the target country, otherwise the ads will get permanently disapproved and the person who set them up will need to re-launch them from scratch (no duplicating or importing the previously approved, but now disapproved ads).

13. If you choose to list the name of an organisation (option 1-4) in your disclaimer, the business address, phone number, email address and website are all required and confirmed by Meta. Additionally, we require a matching email and website domain, and the website must include the organisation name used in the disclaimer. If the requirements are not met, the disclaimer will be disapproved.

• Page name: Advertisers that don't have a website or a related email address that matches the website domain can use this option. The advertiser will need to provide: a local mail-deliverable business address, a verifiable local phone number and any verifiable email address (including email domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and others)

Bear in mind that the Facebook disclaimer is not intended to categorise the type of organisation you have. It is also not intended to be a legal disclaimer. The intent is for transparency on our platforms, and is not a mechanism for complying with additional state/local laws about political ads spending. That being said, if the organisation needs to include a different disclaimer in their ads for legal compliance purposes, they are welcome to do that by writing in the text of the post, or designing in a text overlay to add to any photo/video ads they run.

If none of these common scenarios helped you troubleshoot your disclaimer issue, please contact our team for further assistance.