Twitter to ban political advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#131

Post by CobrastanJorji » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #102

From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficu…

I completely agree with what you're saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#132

Post by lonelappde » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #120

mdorazio wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good system, but I'm not sure it's actually workable at the scale of Twitter or Facebook's ad platforms. That's a a lot of human review.

Well, twitter makes let's say $1Bn per year, so they could spend 15000 man years per year and still be breaking even.

You have not justified that 15000 people is enough to moderate all the content.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#133

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

eertami wrote: post #72

ElijahLynn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Just gonna put it all inline here: Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO 1:05 PM · Oct 30, 2019 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html -------------------------------------------------------- We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reaso…

>While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...

All ads are adversarial.

Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#134

Post by mandeepj » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #58

Quote from Jack > We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Will they also ban politicians? Accounts buy followers to grow and look legit, including politicians. Just removing ads isn't removing power of money, as people are (and will be) spending a lot of money to get organic reach. Some of their most popular accounts are politicians accounts. That brings tons of traffic to Twitter and makes m…

> Will they also ban politicians?

I don't think they will. 'Politicians ban' will be equivalent to banning free expression, and twitter is against that.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#135

Post by busterarm » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #128

ambicapter wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You comment is written in a way that implies that this happens. I think his comment his written to imply that it is possible for this to happen. In which case, it does not require supporting evidence beyond the logical consistency of itself, which is sound, I believe.

busterarm is almost certainly referring to chinese "bots".

That's also an interesting phenomenon. There are a large number of Chinese citizens on the internet who will shout down with comments any message counter to the party line there.

They are real people, aren't they?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#136

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #66

brm wrote: post #22

You can just not follow the bot account.

That's not sufficient.

Twitter surfaces tweets from people you're not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot's tweet.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#137

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

nexuist wrote: post #113

aakilfernandes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.

It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message. Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."

Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it.

If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#138

Post by reaperducer » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #21

duxup wrote: post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example. This is going to be s can of worms.

Probably. But likely a smaller can of worms than allowing political ads.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#139

Post by tenpies » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #121

blotter_paper wrote: post #76

I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be oka…

From what I recall in the JRE and Sam Harris interviews, Jack seemed very reasonable. I think Twitter is something that's gotten away from him (certainly from what he'd like) and is being run by the inmates to a significant degree.

That was my impression as well. It was interesting to see Jack answer and then have the legal council (?) amend Jack's answers or push them in a specific direction. It's very clear that there is a mismatch between what Jack wants, what Twitter shareholders want, and what Twitter's activist pseudo-employee contingent wants.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#140

Post by RyanCavanaugh » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

Most social networks already have to decide what counts as "adult" content, which has just as much gray area as what counts as "political".