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

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

#291
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Advertising is not bribery and the European region is nowhere near the freedom of speech principles of the US. It may feel the same, either because you have never said anything or have never been heard by anyone who cares, but there are countless examples of prosecution that would be summarily dismissed here in the States. Professionally "banned" is not a free speech issue in the slightest. Athletes c…

> there are countless examples of prosecution that would be summarily dismissed here in the States. Care to provide let's say 2 such examples ?

Articles from various perspectives with many examples within:

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/europes-free-speech-apo...

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17113/

https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/01/13/germany-is-silen...

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debates, press interviews and conferences, town halls, canvassing...

Most of the press will not even care about you if you are not in the big 3 or 4 parties. So no, does not work.

That criticism is equally applicable to advertising - if you're not in the big 3 or 4 parties, you likely don't have any advertising budget either.

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

#293
post #277
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is insider trading a different category than other forms of speech? The speech isn't illegal - the act of trading based on insider information is. This works in a similar manner to bomb-making plans being legal to disseminate, but making a bomb being very illegal. > Why is paying someone to murder someone a different category than other forms of speech? This is solicitation to commit a crime, which is a specifi…

Herewith the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, wherein one will find no specific exceptions actually made. * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc... Enjoy.

That's not how this works. The constitution and amendments are the foundation. There are centuries of supreme court rulings and further legal precedent that determine the modern framework.

Free speech does have certain restrictions, which you can easily read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Advertising is not bribery and the European region is nowhere near the freedom of speech principles of the US. It may feel the same, either because you have never said anything or have never been heard by anyone who cares, but there are countless examples of prosecution that would be summarily dismissed here in the States. Professionally "banned" is not a free speech issue in the slightest. Athletes c…

> 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…

> Depriving people of their livelihood for expressing political views is absolutely a free speech issue.

I don't think free speech is the issue here. There's a difference between expressing your views on your own time and involving the company that you work for to adopt those views. We've all seen the disclaimers that people put on their twitter profiles and blogs distancing their personal views from the companies they work for. Such a disclaimer was not issued here. Colin involved the 49ers Franchise and the NFL in his political views. He used their broadcasts to send out his message. Not all the owners necessarily sympathized with his views, especially when it started bringing negative attention to their business. In that regard, I don't think it's all that surprising that it cost him his job.

Note also that there are plenty of current NFL players who express the same sentiments as Colin on social media and in interviews, and they still have their jobs.

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

#295
post #281
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> (More than NPM FYI) I found your claim hard to believe so I went digging but couldn't find any recent resource on the total number of downloads npmjs.org handles per month. I could have sworn they used to publish aggregate stats prominently on their home page somewhere ... but can't seem to find it. Anyway, aggregating* the download numbers of just 12 of the top npm packages comes to about ~504.4m, or half a billio…

it cannot be more than npm.

npm is basically 1 line of code = 1 package

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

#296
Interesting journalistic experiment, however, ads like these are irrelevant unless they can push the amount of exposure that shifts elections. That's going to take a lot of money. The question, then, becomes not whether they can get ads approved, but whether they stay approved even as dollars are poured in.

A more expensive experiment to run, in that case.

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

#297
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are countless examples of prosecution that would be summarily dismissed here in the States. Care to provide let's say 2 such examples ?

Articles from various perspectives with many examples within: https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la... https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/europes-free-speech-apo... https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17113/ https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/01/13/germany-is-silen...

From the first article you linked...just...wow. Soo many U.S. progressives would suffer under that law.

> In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,”

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

#298
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herewith the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, wherein one will find no specific exceptions actually made. * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc... Enjoy.

That's not how this works. The constitution and amendments are the foundation. There are centuries of supreme court rulings and further legal precedent that determine the modern framework. Free speech does have certain restrictions, which you can easily read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Actually, it is how it works. You are confusing case law with what k_sh actually claimed, which was specific exceptions. There do exist U.S. constitutional provisions with specific exceptions, such as the 5th Amendment. The 1st Amendment is not one of them. Indeed, it is famous for being neither specific nor having clear exceptions.

Contrast with the Basic Law of Germany article 5, that has already come up in this discussion, which outlines specific exceptions in paragraph 2. (For another example, see article 8.)

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

#299
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.

No, nothing prevents them asking. Businesses are allowed to ask, you're allowed to refuse, and they're allowed to refuse to transact with you, on the basis of your refusal. It's pretty stupid.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I get the sense that FB simply wants to pass off the liability to ad buyer Totally. It is Russia's responsibility not to accidentally or knowingly meddle with an election, not Facebook's. I guess there is one last question, what was Zuckerberg doing in a congressional hearing?

I'm assuming this is sarcasm but I can kind of see the case that Facebook is making here. For example, if a drunk person behind the wheel of a Ford does a tremendous amount of damaage, no one goes after Ford for not preventing it. Facebook is a tool. Is it Facebook's responsibility to make sure that everyone uses it ethically? I can understand putting in measures to make sure that everyone is using it legally and hav…

However, if a newspaper prints a story saying senator X said Y, and that claim was false, then the newspaper can be sued, regardless of where they got that information or which employee wrote the story.

Given your analogy, the question is, is Facebook more like a car manufacturer or a newspaper?

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