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We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

news.vice.com

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Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#201
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious comment? How do we communicate without advertisements? This is depressing.

How do you communicate to millions of people then? What is your strategy? Visit every single person's home?

Do what that progressive in New York did to challenge the #4 Democrat in the house and win. (Osario-Cortez)

She did exactly that.

Campaign was as follows:

Identify policy platform and benefit to winning majority of voters.

Identify win numbers.

Two of hers were Medicare for All and Living Wages.

Organize volunteers to canvass. Break it down and insure coverage.

Canvass, hold events, town hall, rallies, etc...

Continue, until win numbers plausibly met.

Continue.

Win election, which she did.

The beauty of that campaign is the strategy I put here was announced and implemented. All well ahead of the election. Was nearly a two year effort.

No big money, no big media, no extensive marketing campaign.

The single most important thing that team did was actually ask people for their votes.

A ton of campaigns do not actually do that. They imply and or talk about how bad it can be if you do not vote.

Big difference. And it takes much more of a spend to do too.

This works at any scale.

Sanders showed it in 2016. Same overall approach.

Won 22 States and 45 percent of Delegates doing mostly that.

On a national level, some AD spends are needed, but are not the core of the campaign.

People to people politics work, but that is a clear vote for politicking, not the usual vote against we see most of the time.

On FOR type issues, very large numbers of people will invest FOR, because they see a clear return potential.

Without that, yes more ADS and such are needed, because the ask for vote part is not as prominent, often implied.

My point here is we totally have ways of politicking that work and do not require massive political contributions and or ADS.

I perfer them and would gladly regulate political ADS.

Do the same for perscription drugs, just because doing that makes about as much sense.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#202
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate boards usually have controls against appropriating company resources for personal use.

Presumably there is a tax implication too? In the UK this would probably be a benefit-in-kind and taxed say it's market value as income.

Yes. Same in the US. Things like private jet use are applied as income. However, I'm not sure you would have to do so at retail rates. For example, you would have to pay taxes on the cost of the private jet use. The marginal cost of something like running your personal ads on the favebook platform is so low as to probably not be considered "material" by the tax man.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#203
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine one time. Then everything else imports the `MZ_CONST` file which then references the `MK` or `ZBERG` variables.

dog it’s a PHP shop, nobody re-uses code

PHP's Packagist disagrees with over 1.4m packages and around a half billion package downloads a month. (More than NPM FYI)

https://packagist.org/statistics

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#204
post #98

I am appalled at how bad Facebook did here but buried at the very end of the article Vice does indicate that they needed to provide a valid traceable drivers license and last four of a (maybe?) matching SSN. This means that had they intended to actually publish the ads they would have put some real person on the hook (assuming the submitted data is actually checked against something). Still too easy but for the first…

Is that legal? I didn’t think you were allowed to ask... or require a ssn. This doesn’t seem like one of the exceptions.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#205

> VICE News did not buy any Facebook ads as part of the test; rather, we received approval to include "Paid for by" disclosures for potential ads. Playing devil’s advocate here, but maybe Facebook doesn’t waste time on people who don’t actually buy ads? Would be a much more compelling argument if the were actually able to purchase and run ads, and would be curious to see if the actual act of payment triggered a real…

The fact that the Zuckerberg ad was rejected seems to indicate that they really were being put through a vetting process. It's possible they are vetted again after payment is received but that seems unlikely.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#206
post #98

I am appalled at how bad Facebook did here but buried at the very end of the article Vice does indicate that they needed to provide a valid traceable drivers license and last four of a (maybe?) matching SSN. This means that had they intended to actually publish the ads they would have put some real person on the hook (assuming the submitted data is actually checked against something). Still too easy but for the first…

Seeing as Experian leaked every single SSN in America to hackers, I'd say a SSN is a very small hurdle. Even if it had to match, which I'm sure it does not have to match the disclosure name - just the name of the payor.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#207
post #205

> VICE News did not buy any Facebook ads as part of the test; rather, we received approval to include "Paid for by" disclosures for potential ads. Playing devil’s advocate here, but maybe Facebook doesn’t waste time on people who don’t actually buy ads? Would be a much more compelling argument if the were actually able to purchase and run ads, and would be curious to see if the actual act of payment triggered a real…

The fact that the Zuckerberg ad was rejected seems to indicate that they really were being put through a vetting process. It's possible they are vetted again after payment is received but that seems unlikely.

No it only proves they reject ads from the founder of the company. That’s the only proof you can establish based on the facts. There is no evidence they are vetting anything, and in fact it’s more likely they just filter out zuck.* than the implication that a larger system is at work (Occams razor).

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Professionally "banned" is not a free speech issue in the slightest. This line of reasoning never made sense to me. Free speech is both a legal and a cultural issue. A modern society cannot credibly claim to be free on legal grounds alone. Yeah, the government won't put me in prison or fine me, but if I get fired for being a staunch liberal (or conservative) then I'm not really free, am I? This doesn't just apply t…

The US Constitution also codifies freedom of association so you can have free speech but you can’t force me to associate with you. In the US companies have freedom of association as long as they don’t violate a protected class ( race, religion, sex, age, national origin, etc...). Since you the government can’t force a company to associate with someone they disagree with, you can be fired for things you say.

GP explicitly called out that there is not just a legal issue of free speech, but also a cultural one. Your response, "but it's legal!" in short, does not address that at all.

Lots of things are legal but maybe not what we want. I'd say a working culture where having the wrong political opinion can get you fired is definitely one of them.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#209
I buy political ads as a big part of our business.

This cycle, FB is FAR easier to work with than Google.

I get the sense that FB simply wants to pass off the liability to ad buyer (who signed an affidavit to run those paid for ads... and Vice broke that contract but also probably the law). Whereas Google is giving huge problems for basically all our clients because they seem to be doing manual DD.

Not focusing on whether or not FB should take on this DD, as an ad buyer FB's approach and process is at least 10x smoother - at least for us. I'm not joking. can only think of one odd compliance issue we had with mismatched IG and FB profile names.

Google on the other hand... problems every time. Problems in the approval process to get personally approved (ux and process is horrid) and then they constantly reject ads we submit as unapproved for politics, despite going through this process many many times.

Re: We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably one of the only people they could actually be sure wasn't buying Facebook ads. Whereas a senator buying Facebook ads is, in itself, quite likely. Not really a fair comparison.

So what you're saying is, because a senator could conceivably be running ads, then any ad that claims to be by a senator should be approved without scrutiny? Besides being preposterous, that same argument applies to literally anybody in the world except, I guess, Mark Zuckerberg. So it sounds like Facebook's algorithm for detecting abuse is `if submitter == "Mark Zuckerberg" { reject(); }`

> So what you're saying is, because a senator could conceivably be running ads, then any ad that claims to be by a senator should be approved without scrutiny?

That was not said in the message you replied to.

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