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Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#31

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

blocked_again wrote: post #5
john___matrix wrote: post #4

I wonder if it'll be a obscurely named toggle hidden away in a settings sub page somewhere just so they can say they've offered the option. Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.

> Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default This means the revenue KPI of the ads team would go down right? So will never happen.

It's probably worth noting that if you were running an online ads platform, revenue probably wouldn't be what you'd optimise for. You'd be better off optimising for an event that advertisers will pay you for.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#32

Post by Raed667 »

martin-adams wrote: post #29
Raed667 wrote: post #25

Here Facebook is making a stand on what is political and what is not? Is climate change political? Are immigration policies political? etc..

You need to be authorised to run ads about politics, so this is simple way for them to know if it's a political ad or not. The challenge is if advertisers miss classify what the ad it about, which then is subjective to Facebook as you say.

We just moved the problem one step away. If (for example) i classify my ad about climate-change as non-political. Can Facebook disagree with that?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#34

Post by bronco21016 »

sshagent wrote: post #30
simion314 wrote: post #16

I am not from US, I hate FB during electoral campagins not because of paid ads but because of people sharing tons of political crap, I would like to hide all political post and shares of my friends and ads.

tell me about it. On my browser its quite nice as i have the "F.B. Purity" addon, that lets me choose words to filter entire posts by. So i add both common political part words ( tories, labour, conservative etc ) and my feed is a lot nicer. Its just a shame when i use fb on my phone i get to read that stuff. Muting people for 30 days is a reasonable start i guess, but i'd much rather filter by content

I tried muting people during the 2016 cycle. It worked for sure, my feed was less political garbage. It turns out my feed was also mostly empty. I quit and have been off ever since.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#36

Post by hutzlibu »

chippy wrote: post #28
simion314 wrote: post #16

I am not from US, I hate FB during electoral campagins not because of paid ads but because of people sharing tons of political crap, I would like to hide all political post and shares of my friends and ads.

This is the problem with reddit also and twitter - indeed all social media. The main problem is that US political elections "season" runs for 2 years! So out of every 4 years, half of the time is campaigning season so it means that the rest of the worlds social media is polluted with "tons of political crap" 50% of the time. For US folks: look at how other western democracies run their electoral campaigns to help und…

Well, that the US presidential voting system is weird, is out of the question. But simply having a shorter campaign before election is no magic bullet either. Here we have the saying, that politicians only listen to people during the election. So shorten that time, shortens the window to get through with something.

But from a rational and idealistic point of view, none of this makes much sense. Campaigning is a huge waste of everyones attention and energy.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#37

Post by rightbyte »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #9
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #3

I want the ability to turn off political non-advertisement posts.

I'm surprised we don't get more control over our "feeds" on some platforms - it would be useful signal for advertisers I'd imagine, so there's a win-win aspect. On Reddit I'd like to filter out (ie remove) all posts with animal pictures. I keep coming back to Slashdot's model of democratised curation.

The FB algorithm of feeding you unchronoligal crap instead of what your friends write seems to get more ad views since you scroll more. It is really user hostile and are depleting there user pool in the long term.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#39

Post by hutzlibu »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #22

What if someone were to develop an app, browser extension, etc. that automatically disabled political ads in Facebook. Why not disable political ads by default and if users want them, then they can enable them. Otherwise this is nothing more than the old "opt-out" trick, as used for email spam and now ubiquitous in internet marketing. The choice should not be to "opt-out", it should be to "opt-in".

I don't use facebook, so I am confused, but aren't there apps/browser extension that block all ads, called addblockers? (or are they blocked by facebook?)

Why on earth would I choose to view normal advertisement, but not political?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#40

Post by zo1 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #9
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #3

I want the ability to turn off political non-advertisement posts.

I'm surprised we don't get more control over our "feeds" on some platforms - it would be useful signal for advertisers I'd imagine, so there's a win-win aspect. On Reddit I'd like to filter out (ie remove) all posts with animal pictures. I keep coming back to Slashdot's model of democratised curation.

It's the same reason Google doesn't let you have more control over the search results. If they give out granular-enough permissions / tooling, then plugins and other tools would be somehow able to make your FB/Google experience akin to a completely different site, with very little control on their part. As a bit of an analogy: They want to be the television that you look at your content through as well as the content provider/curator, but they also don't want to be forced into being just the radio-broadcasting infrastructure provider which is all that they really are if you drill down far enough. Oh and ads, of course.
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