Twitter to ban political advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#341

Post by raz32dust » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

I commend Jack Dorsey for his ethics. I think there could have been a better solution though - why not just disallow targeting on political ads? Only allow coarse-grained targeting, say at a state level. You still give political campaigns the opportunity to leverage the network and spread the word, and you get at least part of the revenue.

The problem with social media advertising is the targeted nature of ads. If you take that out, and place ads like DuckDuckGo does, it is not that different from newspaper ads and much less dangerous.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#342

Post by roenxi » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #283

tonmoy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? What if the government decides the earth is the center of the universe and imprisons the scientist who has observable proof that it isn’t? What’s if the government decides “encryption with backdoor is unsafe” is a false statement and suppresses all speech that says otherwise?

Slippery slope arguments like this are stupid because a government determined to be a bad actor isn't going to let a constitution stop them. Russia has a constitution, heck, Soviet Russia did. The reality of having laws against broadcasting lies is that they will be applied sensibly if the rest of the system is sensible - and if it is not, you have worse problems.

The people who will have control of the system have no incentive to be sensible; they have incentives to do what the executive government tells them to do and situations get very political very quickly. Consider the IRS vs conservative groups under Obama (according to Republicans).

The issue isn't a slippery slope as much as it is centralising power to a single point vulnerable to corruption & allowing politically charged decisions to be hidden behind opaque bureaucratic processes.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#343

Post by Consultant32452 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #163

nlh wrote: post #74

Bravo. That whole thread is smart, well-reasoned, and puts democracy above profits. Good for them. I particularly like his last point: > A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address. Whic…

> Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.” He was even more explicit: > For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”

I'm skeptical of this. Is a private charity promoting an LGBT fundraiser a political ad? What about Fox News pushing an ad about how other news is fake. Or MSNBC pushing an ad about Russia collusion? Was the now infamous Gillette woke ad political? It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#344

Post by product50 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

heylook wrote: post #271

product50 wrote: post #254

So why not use the same methodology on TV or print as well and ban political ads across? Why is social media singled out here? What about ads on YouTube? This is nothing but a copout solution. Twitter doesn't have the will nor the capital to be part of the debate here (and political ads are likely too small for them to care) - so they are trying to gain strategy credit by just saying this is a bad idea. NYTimes is ha…

IMO the difference is a combination of two things: * the unprecedented targeting ability of social media ads vs traditional broadcast/print * the unprecedented amount of disinformation (especially from foreign governments) vs traditional broadcast/print If you can't see the difference between the two, frankly, you haven't been paying attention.

Foreign govt can also pay for political ads via TV/print as well. Most of the foreign govt interference is not via ads but via organic channels such as FB Pages, FB user accounts, Twitter accounts/bots. Those will continue to operate regardless of this decision by Twitter

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#345

Post by product50 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #328

product50 wrote: post #254

So why not use the same methodology on TV or print as well and ban political ads across? Why is social media singled out here? What about ads on YouTube? This is nothing but a copout solution. Twitter doesn't have the will nor the capital to be part of the debate here (and political ads are likely too small for them to care) - so they are trying to gain strategy credit by just saying this is a bad idea. NYTimes is ha…

I'm totally fine banning all political ads, let's do it!

Then only a few named candidates will have most of the leverage. Is that what we want?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#346

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:10 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…

Many trees constitute a forest. A single tree does not. At some point, a group of trees becomes large enough to be considered a forest. There is no way to provide any non-arbitrary rule where that point is.

Does this render the concept of a "forest" meaningless?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#347

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

I've advertised on twitter, and you can either promote tweets or promote your account. When you promote an account, it raises the visibility of the account, its description, and recent tweets (which people end up seeing when they consider following you or learning more about you).

So promoting an account can have the same effect as promoting a tweet, though perhaps at a higher cost (because it's a less efficient way of promoting a tweet). If political advertisers end up doing this, twitter may profit from their policy shift, but without actually achieving the putative goal.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#348

Post by baddox » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:10 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…

Okay, you can point out one extreme side of the continuum. What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?

> I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust.

This is true, of course, but why is this such a serious or novel concern? All criminal trials, for instance, require making a judgement on the truth about reality. Of course some cases are very hard, and sometimes we get the wrong outcome. But what else do you suggest? That no one ever attempt to determine anything about reality?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#349

Post by StevenRayOrr » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #322

What defines a political ad? For example are prolife ads political, even if they mention no laws or politics? What about ads that do not mention politics but are targeted to influence policy? Seems like an ambiguous category except for outright promoting particular candidates and laws.

Lots of democracies have legal definitions for what counts as political advertising. Obviously Twitter doesn't have to use those definitions, but there are fairly clear guidelines in a number of jurisdictions. And it doesn't have to be a situation where they set rules for life: taking a firm apolitical stance on advertising likely requires reassessing the rules over time. But it is doable.

What will be really interesting is whether Twitter tries to work with governments or whether they unilaterally come to their own rules. There be dragons on both fronts.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#350

Post by humanrebar » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

basilgohar wrote: post #308

Aperocky wrote: post #269

Freedom of expression inherently includes the freedom to pay for expression. What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city? But then again, since twitter is a private enterprise, I fully respect their right to act on their own platform.

Citizens United is the example that shows it's more complicated than that. Once limits are removed, then the same power structures that make and keep powerful entities powerful can continue to be reenforced if checks are not put into place to limit the power money can have in being a vector or amplifier for free speech. What paying for expression has come to is that you can dominate discourse simply by paying more. S…

Arguably the problem is that the limits on contributions to candidates and parties puts them at a specific disadvantage. PACs and advocacy-as-journalism partly exists because political parties are restricted while relatively unaccountable organizations are not.