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Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#31

Post by meowface »

untog wrote: post #12
defertoreptar wrote: post #5

I'm trying to understand the article's premise. Is all political advertising immoral? Is it something about the way the ads were distributed that make them immoral? Is it just immoral because the politics itself was "wrong"?

The leave campaigns were recently found to be in violation of election law, so no, this isn't just a "moral" issue: > the Electoral Commission found that the youth-focused campaign, BeLeave, had been joint-working with the official Vote Leave campaign — yet the pair had not jointly declared spending thereby enabling the official campaign to overspend by almost half a million pounds. And that overspend went straight t…

>yet the pair had not jointly declared spending thereby enabling the official campaign to overspend by almost half a million pounds. And that overspend went straight to Aggregate IQ to run targeted Facebook ads.

Sadly this kind of "overspending" is effectively legal in the US due to PACs. Good to hear it's illegal in the UK, but seems that isn't stopping people.

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#32

Post by maym86 »

Can someone please explain the argument against passing laws forcing all adverts on advertising platforms like Facebook and Google to be searchable and transparent so we can see who is purchasing them, the parameters used for targeting the advert and what they are publishing? I can't see a downside for the majority of people.

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#33

Post by jonny_eh »

maym86 wrote: post #32

Can someone please explain the argument against passing laws forcing all adverts on advertising platforms like Facebook and Google to be searchable and transparent so we can see who is purchasing them, the parameters used for targeting the advert and what they are publishing? I can't see a downside for the majority of people.

It'll be a hassle for Facebook?

At this point, it's worth it.

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#35

Post by dillondoyle »

maym86 wrote: post #32

Can someone please explain the argument against passing laws forcing all adverts on advertising platforms like Facebook and Google to be searchable and transparent so we can see who is purchasing them, the parameters used for targeting the advert and what they are publishing? I can't see a downside for the majority of people.

Perhaps because 1st Amendment gives right to anonymous speech: https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

Perhaps because it gives established players a big leg up in terms of compliance costs (imagine being a small news site having to create this searchable system etc)

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#36

Post by lostlogin »

dane-pgp wrote: post #28
to_bpr wrote: post #16

It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the focus seems to be entirely on the "wrong" side of the "desired" outcome. At this point it amounts to fighting very hard to find any reason to undo a democratically determined result.

If just 1% of the population of the UK changed their voting intention (from Remain to Leave) because of illegally bought or misleading advertising, then undoing that effect would mean that Remain would have won. Invoking the "democratically determined result" is begging the question, since we don't really know whether the result would have been the same if the Leave campaign hadn't broken the rules: https://www.thegu…

I think the overriding point is that a simple majority is completely the wrong format for descisions like this. I’d have suggested a two thirds majority requires for change. There is also the argument about them stifling debate.

There is an intersting criticism of the format in the below link from Chris Patten

“I think referendums are awful. The late and great Julian Critchley used to say that, not very surprisingly, they were the favourite form of plebiscitary democracy of Mussolini and Hitler. They undermine Westminster. What they ensure, as we saw in the last election, is that if you have a referendum on an issue, politicians during an election campaign say: "Oh, we're not going to talk about that, we don't need to talk about that, that's all for the referendum." So during the last election campaign, the euro was hardly debated. I think referendums are fundamentally anti-democratic in our system, and I wouldn't have anything to do with them. On the whole, governments only concede them when governments are weak.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#37

Post by matthewmacleod »

lostlogin wrote: post #27
to_bpr wrote: post #16

It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the focus seems to be entirely on the "wrong" side of the "desired" outcome. At this point it amounts to fighting very hard to find any reason to undo a democratically determined result.

Democratic yes, but ludicrous. Setting up something as critical as that to have such a slim majority decide is illogical. The U.K. doesn’t seem to get referendums. Important note however - they didn’t have a referendum to join the EU but maybe that’s covered by the one on joining the European Communities?

Yes, the UK voted strongly in favour of Common Market membership in 1975. While the process around the EC becoming the EU has changed the nature of it substantially, I think it would be misleading to say that there was no referendum.

The UK fwiw has only had three referendums in its history. Precisely because they have a habit of leading to the current fucking stupid situation we now find ourselves in.

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#38

Post by clort »

defertoreptar wrote: post #5

I'm trying to understand the article's premise. Is all political advertising immoral? Is it something about the way the ads were distributed that make them immoral? Is it just immoral because the politics itself was "wrong"?

Its immoral when its targeted secretly in this way. If lies are posted publicly on a billboard (or a bus) then everybody can see it, somebody can point out that it is a lie, and the posters can be held responsible for their misinformation

Re: Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

#39

Post by matthewmacleod »

morsma wrote: post #29
to_bpr wrote: post #16

It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the focus seems to be entirely on the "wrong" side of the "desired" outcome. At this point it amounts to fighting very hard to find any reason to undo a democratically determined result.

Because all these things (Brexit/Trump) wasn't planned to happen, so they're in need of arguments why a fair democratic vote should be invalid. This is what's happening.

What is a “fair democratic vote”? Is it still fair if it’s a simple majority? Is it still fair if official campaigns break the law? Is it still fair if constituent nations’ views are disregarded?

That concept is a hard one to define and precisely why it’s a bad idea to have simple majority referendums on complex technical matters.

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