Facebook will finally allow advertisers to resume running political and social issue ads in the U.S. on Thursday, Axios reports.

“Google will lift its ban on political ads on Wednesday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that had been active since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol,” Politico reports.

Politico: “Facebook and Google’s on-again, off-again bans on political ads are hitting campaigns during a crucial fundraising window, cutting off a key pipeline to potential supporters and disrupting early planning for the next round of elections, from state and local races this year to looming midterm elections in 2022.”

“The self-imposed bans — put in place, lifted and then reimposed in some form by both companies since the week before Election Day 2020 — have essentially pressed pause on a political industry that spent $3.2 billion advertising on Google and Facebook in the last two and a half years. Some digital political firms are freezing hiring due to the uncertainty surrounding their biggest ad platforms. And the bans have interfered with organizing and early fundraising efforts piggybacking off a new administration and the start of a new election cycle.”

Google informed its advertising partners Wednesday that beginning Jan. 14, its platforms will block all political ads, as well as any related to the Capitol insurrection, “following the unprecedented events of the past week and ahead of the upcoming presidential inauguration,” Axios reports.

The Markup monitored what happened when Facebook reversed its political ad ban ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs.

“While Facebook’s controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists’ feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users’ feeds.”

Google informed its advertising partners that beginning Dec. 10, it will lift the post-election political ad ban that went into effect after polls closed on Nov. 3, Axios reports.

Wall Street Journal: “Facebook told the advertisers it is continuing to ‘temporarily pause’ all ads on social issues, electoral or political ads in the U.S. for another month, though it may lift sooner.”

Google informed its advertisers that it will broadly block election ads after polls close Nov. 3, Axios reports.

Big Tech platforms have been under pressure to address how their ad policies will handle conflicts over the presidential election’s outcome.

A new Yale study shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, political ads do very little to persuade voters.

Said political scientist Alexander Coppock: “There’s an idea that a really good ad, or one delivered in just the right context to a targeted audience, can influence voters, but we found that political ads have consistently small persuasive effects across a range of characteristics.”

He added: “Positive ads work no better than attack ads. Republicans, Democrats, and independents respond to ads similarly. Ads aired in battleground states aren’t substantially more effective than those broadcast in non-swing states.”