Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter to ban political advertising

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#141

Post by nickfromseattle »

mdorazio wrote: post #43
Miner49er wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A post from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985 A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following: > You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple. Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services an…

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.

A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.

For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]

No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.

Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.

There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.

It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.

I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.

Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?

[0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#142

Post by jMyles »

acollins1331 wrote: post #2

We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV. Why is it so hard for Facebook or Twitter to do the same thing?

There are a lot of baltantly false ads on TV, and have been for decades.

Remember "this is your brain on drugs"? Or how about the "drugs fund terrorism" super bowl ads? That was a blatantly false campaign designed primarily not to discourage drug use, but to make it difficult for mainstream organizations and their people from supporting drug policy reform.

Isn't every Volkswagen ad which touted fuel economy in their diesel vehicles essentially a blatantly false ad on the issue of climate change and carbon use?

Many pharmaceutical ads have some blatantly false messaging, whether overt or not, and all of them carry the same political message: that the current system of regulation and intellectual property around drugs is healthy for people.

TV is overrun by blatantly false ads that, once you think about it, have an unambiguously political component.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#143

Post by lonelappde »

tyre wrote: post #44

Good for them, and good for us. Without controlling bots and sockpuppets, it's not a total fix. Still, a step in the right direction. Given the larger overlap between Facebook users and people who vote, we'll need follow-up from Zuckerberg to really make this stick. Step in the right direction.

Twitter has been famously hugely toxic to humanity and democracy for years, and that was strictly on the non-ads side of content, and Dorsey has refused to do anything about it because he craves those engagement numbers. Paid ads are a sideshow distraction.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#144

Post by wavefunction »

bhupy wrote: post #99
tyre wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the American Cancer Society can advocate for itself but not for candidates or policies. Fine: Donate to fight cancer Not fine: Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research

How about ACLU or Planned Parenthood?

Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

crazygringo wrote: post #115

Wow. That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no? I totally support it. But I've also got to be brutally honest: I wonder if this is a sincere moral stance on Dorsey's part, or more of a business calculation that, leading up to the lightning-rod 2020 election, accepting political ads ultimately has the potential to do more damage to Twitter's reputation than the money would make up for -- or have…

> That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no?

OTOH, it means political messaging on the platform will be entirely controlled by how the firm manages the organic newsfeed, which even if in theory it is subject to election and campaign finance laws, there is very little regulatory experience or direct case law on. Shutting out official ads actually magnifies managements freedom to shape the political narrative and the relative power of illegal influence operations.

And non-obvious astroturf probably is better for engagement on the platform than overt political ads.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#146

Post by buboard »

crazygringo wrote: post #115

Wow. That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no? I totally support it. But I've also got to be brutally honest: I wonder if this is a sincere moral stance on Dorsey's part, or more of a business calculation that, leading up to the lightning-rod 2020 election, accepting political ads ultimately has the potential to do more damage to Twitter's reputation than the money would make up for -- or have…

It s certainly not worth the risk of being regulated post-election. It's a good decision and FB should do the same.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#147

Post by justapassenger »

mandeepj wrote: post #134
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.

They also say that they don't want money to be giving uneven power to politicians, but that's totally happening without ads.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#148

Post by shadowgovt »

Their heart's in the right place, but mechanically, doesn't this shift the money from "pay for an ad on Twitter" to "pay for a bot farm / human clickfarm to like and reshare the tweet?"

Twitter's engagement model (popularity ∝ importance) is still flawed in gameable ways, and political operations have the money to pay to play those games.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#150

Post by vonmoltke »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #131
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."

> one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."

That misses a whole bunch of political advertising. Most of it, I'd wager.

Post reply on HN