The company and other major online ad sellers including Alphabet
Inc's <GOOGL.O> Google and Twitter Inc <TWTR.N> have long
offered free dedicated assistance to strengthen relationships
with top advertisers such as presidential campaigns.
Brad Parscale, who was Trump's online ads chief in 2016, last
year called onsite "embeds" from Facebook crucial to the
candidate's victory. Facebook has said that Democratic
challenger Hillary Clinton was offered identical help, but she
accepted a different level than Trump.
Google and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests to
comment on whether they also would pull back support.
Facebook said it could offer assistance to more candidates
globally by focusing on offering support through an online
portal instead of in person. It said that political
organizations still would be able to contact employees to
receive basic training on using Facebook or for assistance on
getting ads approved.
Bloomberg first reported the new approach.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google served as "quasi-digital
consultants" to U.S. election campaigns in 2016, researchers
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
University of Utah found in a paper published a year ago.
The companies helped campaigns navigate their services' ad
systems and "actively" shaped campaign communication by
suggesting what types of messages to direct to whom, the
researchers stated.
Facebook's involvement with Trump's campaign drew scrutiny from
U.S. lawmakers after the company found its user data had
separately been misused by political data firm Cambridge
Analytica, which consulted for the Trump campaign.
In written testimony to U.S. lawmakers in June, Facebook said
its employees had not spotted any misuse "in the course of their
interactions with Cambridge Analytica" during the election.
(Reporting by Paresh Dave in San Francisco and Bhanu Pratap in
Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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