An anonymous reader writes: Teen Vogue published “How Facebook Is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election.” It’s a 2,000-plus-word story comprising a series of interviews with various senior Facebook employees about how the Silicon Valley tech giant is working to avoid nefarious political activity in the US’s coming presidential election.
The positive tone of the piece, and lack of byline indicating who wrote it, led some on Twitter to speculate that it was a piece of sponsored content — that is, an article paid for and overseen by Facebook to promote itself.
This suspicion was seemingly confirmed when, some time after publishing, Teen Vogue appended a note to the top of the story, reading: “Editor’s note: This is sponsored editorial content.”
Facebook instead denied that it was sponsored content, saying it was just a regular article, and the note disappeared from the top of the story again.
