As Mark Zuckerberg readies to testify before the House Financial Services Committee in D.C. on Wednesday, Facebook’s chief operating officer took the stage in Los Angeles to defend the social network’s policy of not fact-checking political ads.

Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged the company continues to allow for factually inaccurate posts to continue to proliferate on the site, but says that they aren’t distributed as widely if they are flagged as “false.”

“When we have misinformation...unless it’s hate that will lead to real world violence, we need to let the debate continue. We don’t want things to go viral, we mark those as false, and it dramatically reduces sharing. If it’s hate — if someone really shows up to the polls on the wrong day, we need to take it down,” she said at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon.

‘There were certainly disagreements over Mark’s speech’

Sandberg’s comments came after Zuckerberg defended allowing politicians to lie in their ads at a speech during Georgetown University’s “Democracy in a Digital Age” event last week. His comments sparked criticism, including from Democratic presidential front-runners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, the latter of whom accused Facebook of actively helping President Donald Trump spread lies.

“There were certainly disagreements over Mark’s speech,” Sandberg said. “The transparency is dramatically different this time around. You can see the origin of where a person is. If you look at our ad library we didn’t have this [in 2016]. You can see any political ad anywhere in the country even if they’re not targeting you. Now you can see everything. Yesterday, we launched a presidential ad tracker so you can see the campaigns much more holistically.”

Echoing Zuckerberg’s rationale, she said, “We take political ads because we believe they’re part of political discourse. If you look at it over time, the people who benefit from running ads are those who aren’t covered by mainstream media, people who have different points of view, and those who aren’t incumbents.”

“But we’ve taken much stronger steps on hate, looked at white nationalism, separatism, and we’ve really come down on a strong policy of voter suppression, which we’re considering as hate,” she added.

Facebook does not allow hate speech, terrorism, violence, bullying, and voter suppression, but Zuckerberg and Sandberg believe that blatant lies in political ads or posts about a news event are not as toxic.

“We have a very strong free expression bent. If something is false, we don’t take it down. We send it to third party fact checkers. We dramatically decrease distribution — to about 20% — and we show related articles. The challenges of scale here are really important. A lot of the areas we’re reluctant to weigh in on is because we know we can’t do this well at scale,” she said.