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Twitter to ban political advertising

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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#531

Post by tasty_freeze »

erichocean wrote: post #469
zanny wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to make a slippery slope argument about a private corporations private, for-profit website is hilarious. Twitter will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders. If you don't want your communications to be under the total absolute control of a corporate entity you have no influence over, you might want to pack your bag…

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?

> And the grandparent just argued that we should easily be able to regulate companies.

That is what you got out of comment? That certainly wasn't my argument, and rereading what I wrote, I still don't see how you get it.

Let me be succinct: I wasn't arguing for or against Twitter's actions or making any suggestions for what I would do. I was simply pointing out that making an argument solely on the grounds it is a slippery slope is vacuous.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#532

Post by nickbauman »

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…

This point of view is kinda incoherent. These platforms are not open. They're owned. And the owners can decide what you can and cannot say on it. In the end, if they think that some kinds of expression are not good for them, they not only have the right, but from a corporate perspective, a responsibility to their enterprise to end that expression on their platform.

Pressure from lawmakers and the public alike can change their policies. And we can always vote with our feet.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#533

Post by danans »

baddox wrote: post #348
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 t…

> What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?

Basically an arms race of lies, where those willing to lie the most have the greatest advantage. What's worse is that the most insidious of the lies will appeal to the parts of the targets' psyches that wants very much to believe the lies, and therefore unlikely to proactively fact check (i.e Pizzagate).

And as has been the trend of late, lies that are eventually publicly debunked will be minimized as being "just jokes".

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#534

Post by yters »

exergy wrote: post #359
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.

This level of pedantry drives me up the wall. Not everything needs to be invented from first principles. Profile ads are banned, yes, because they involve teh candidates. Policy ads are banned because they again involve politics. We can start anywhere ! Let's say 'nothing from any entity that receives money from a political party'. Or 'anything mentioning election candidates'. Or 'anything with certain keywords in it…

It's a real to life point. Live Action's prolife ads were taken down for being 'political' even though the ads have nothing to do with politics.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#535

Post by zobzu »

ljm wrote: post #521
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

The difficulty is that we once used propaganda in war time, because we needed it. The problem now is that you don’t know who is doing it, and for what. And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.

nowadays most of us have no idea what is propaganda and what isn't. heck sometimes you eventually research it and realize stuff you believed was true for decades because you were just told so by some authoritative source (like "TV" or what not really), turn out, is between misleading to flat out wrong. Note that I'm not even thinking about this in terms of politics. It seems to be the case for so many different things, sometimes due to ignorance, sometimes malice.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#536

Post by gingergreen »

WalterSear wrote: post #352
gameswithgo wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the use of fake account swarms to spread political ideology seems the more powerful use of twitter than legitimate ads. will we see a correspondingly brave effort to delete fake accounts?

Already against the TOS, and they already do that.

It's like using a butterfly net to capture water. They do it but it's not effective.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#537

Post by wbl »

briandear wrote: post #179
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.

A sympathetic news outlet is often treading on the edge of political advertising as well. Some TV station airing a favorable or unfavorable documentary on a candidate during election season when executives of those stations have publicly supported (or not supported) a candidate or party seems no different than a PAC buying an ad on that same station.

Imagine if we applied this standard to a story of significant presidential malfeasance in October. Something so terrible no one would ever vote for the person. Should we?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#538

Post by blotter_paper »

siosonel wrote: post #463
jlmorton wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"binary judgement of truth" I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias. Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it…

> And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative

Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.

Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#539

Post by jimkleiber »

pubutil wrote: post #468
buboard wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh her questions were more reasonable than others, like for example the question about the sexual orientations of Libra association member boards. Still, her question about what constitutes a political lie is not representative of 99% of political lies , which are usually more subtle and subject to debate. Also, his response "we should let the people see for themselves the lies and judge politicians accordingly" was…

>“. . . was not really countered at all” That was probably the only point Zuckerberg made that I agree with, though I don’t doubt that we think that way for different reasons. If I know social networks are deleting ads or posts that are deemed untruthful then 1) how do I see who determines the truthfulness of the network’s content and 2) how can I trust that nothing else is being removed at will? It’s a classic argum…

What if the networks aren't deleting the content but just not distributing it to you? For example, Facebook determines what shows up on my newsfeed. If my friend posts something, and Facebook guesses that I won't be interested in it, it won't show on my newsfeed (I think) or it will be buried in the less important section. It may still exist on my friend's wall because he posted it, but I don't see it unless I actively go to his wall.

So even if the networks don't delete the content, they are already determining what we should and shouldnt see, no?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#540

Post by Mirioron »

henrikschroder wrote: post #462
heretoo wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about. Only one country has the first amendment, and this decision from twitter is globally applicable, so it shouldn't factor into the decision.

> Only one country has the first amendment Do you think other countries don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press?

I wonder about this point. The universal declaration of human rights even mentions this in article 19, but few countries seem to actually uphold that value.
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