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

511–520 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#511

Post by dwoozle »

octonion wrote: post #200
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…

Are political propaganda and deliberate lies the type of speech the Founding Fathers were trying to protect?

What do you think of a world where Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan get to decide what is and isn’t “political propaganda and deliberate lies”? Because until very recently, they were “the government.”

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#512

Post by JaRail »

knzhou wrote: post #245
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…

> And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. [...] This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about. Doesn'…

Those advertising methods don't allow you to micro-target based on people's private behavior. Micro-targeting and machine learning lets campaigns (like Cambridge Analytica's) generate what's effectively a thousand different campaigns, targeting exactly what triggers specific people the most. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from saying the exact opposite thing to two different people. That's what our current institutions may not be prepared to handle.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#513

Post by 131012 »

rapind wrote: post #481
harryh wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is who gets to be the arbiter of what counts as "political propaganda and deliberate lies"? The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all. I tend to think that if this is true for government, it's probably true for large corporations as well.

I think the issue is whether it still qualifies as free speech when it's paid advertisement. Inevitably the companies with the largest coffers and most to gain get a megaphone and you end up with tiers of free speech (pay to be heard).

And they are not banning political tweets...

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#514

Post by erichocean »

aioprisan wrote: post #488
erichocean wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evergreen: Twitter is a public company. And the grandparent just argued that we should easily be able to regulate companies. You're saying the opposite, now we can't regulate because they're quote-unquote "private"? Well, which is it? Can we regulate for-profit companies for the good of the nation or not? If not, why not?

We already regulate companies through laws. Pass the appropriate laws! The alternative is that we hope for companies to self-regulate, which may or may not align with what's good for society.

My suggestions for lawmakers is as follows:

If you have a user base in excess of 1% of the general population, you are a "Platform" and cannot restrict entrance by individuals or businesses, or full participation thereof, except upon a court order limiting said participation. [Fines t.b.d., but expect them to be punitive in nature.] This law supersedes any Terms of Service a provider might wish to enforce.

Want to enforce "whatever you want" on your "platform"? Stay below the 1% threshold and you're good. Otherwise, you need to interact with the public in a completely neutral manner.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#515

Post by nyczomg »

criddell wrote: post #225
vonmoltke wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You have to start somewhere.

While I agree with you, the most vocal of Twitter users likely won’t. Some will be furious if NRA ads are allowed, and others furious if ACLU ads are allowed. And for some reason those are the people society has decided to listen to.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#516

Post by spunker540 »

rapind wrote: post #467
BurningFrog wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contrarian view is that banning political advertising favors incumbents in elections. The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.

Incumbents usually have a lot more money to spend on advertising though too. On average I doubt advertising helps challengers more than incumbents (there are always edge cases of course).

It comes down to incrementality. Sure Trump has way more money than most challengers, but most people have also already made up their minds about him. His cost to acquire incremental voters is probably much higher than a lesser-known challenger.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#517

Post by yourbandsucks »

jlmorton wrote: post #423
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 often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify. First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don't mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult. Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in t…

1) Get sympathetic media to print a claim

2) Plaster claim over grainy black-and-white photo, with attribution. Run TV/internet campaign with it.

If you're having a lawyerly debate about the technicalities of the accusation, you've already lost.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#518

Post by samirillian »

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 agree with your general points, but I'll argue against their relative priority.

You're saying that all speech is somehow political. I agree. Yet you must admit that on an advertising platform, there are some forms of political speech (e.g., the type allowed by ad buys) that, in lieu of some external regulation, will be _inherently_ biased. That is, the economic arrangement can only pit one group against another.

The only _true_ solution to this problem is a platform where the stakeholders (users) also govern all parts of the platform like a common pooled resource. But we know this cannot happen because, well, capitalism.

So I do not discount your claim that all goings-on in public fora are inherently political, I'll just pit two concrete facts against your abstract observation: 1) limiting political ad buys will be less bad than not limiting political ad buys and 2 we can only start really reasoning about your abstract concept of relative existential truths after we fundamentally fix a fundamentally broken economic and technical arrangement.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#519

Post by yellow_postit »

gradys wrote: post #261
Frondo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the better questions she asked was, "should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?" Zuck's response was, "well, I think it's BAD if you LIE. Telling lies is bad." but wouldn't say that Facebook would moderate that kind of content. I personally don't see a legitimate free speech claim saying that political parties shou…

I believe Zuckerberg's answer to that question was that such an ad would be banned. It's an explicit exception in the policy that permits lying in political ads, an exception that bans lies in service of voter suppression. To the broader question, about whether all lies in political ads should be banned, the free speech argument against is that while it's easy to invent easy and obvious cases of lying, enforcing that…

He did not provide a bright line answer and hemmed and hawed quite a bit. He tried to reframe as “harm” but of course provided no clear definition there. So there’s “some” undefined policy that might maybe apply. He and the PR team really flubbed the obvious questions showing I think how uncomfortable and unclear they are internally about their policy and where to draw the line.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#520

Post by fzeroracer »

monkeywork wrote: post #449
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…

So is it not better to take the twitter approach here and just say - political advertising = banned? Take the decision out of what is true / not true out of it and just remove the political advertisements all together.

All advertising is incredibly political, because companies operate in a politicized world.

Under this guidance for example, Shell could advertise all they want on twitter, but running an ad against Shell about how they pollute the environment or contribute to global warming would be banned.

So then your options are to ban all advertising, or be selective in what advertising you allow. Which is inherently a political position.

Post reply on HN