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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

#71

Post by toyg »

arethuza wrote: post #60
bhaavan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political ads are explicitly marked, and can be turned off. On the other hand, to classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial. More so, there is no clear universal definition of this. One man's politics is other man's "important announcement". With such ambiguous definitions it is hard to train a ML model for this purpose explicitly. On the other hand, if you downvote and dismiss political post…

Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like: "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status." Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#72

Post by FreeRadical »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think it…

On Twitter you are able to mute words if that helps in your case

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#73

Post by sneak »

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.

Unfollow your friends that post boring partisan nonsense.

Alternately, just delete your Facebook account, and stop donating content and ad revenue to a censorship platform.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#74

Post by avian »

arethuza wrote: post #51
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think it…

How do you define where the boundary is for what is and isn't politics? Ads paid for by overtly political organisations may be easy to identify, but what about content from individuals?

I feel like a good approximation would be to just turn Bayesian priors on or off (or whatever is their equivalent of "push this widely popular thing, even if it's not supported by this person's specific interests learned from their usage data").

My anecdote: I recently made a Twitter account specifically to follow some artists and share some art. There is nothing in what I wrote on Twitter, or in who I follow or tweets I liked or in fact my IP-based geolocation (I'm not from US) that would say to the Algorithm that I'm in any way interested in American politics. On the contrary, for a long time I tried clicking "not interested in this" for anything related to politics. And yet, the AI timeline in that account is regularly swamped by US political drama I'm not interested in, can't do anything about and generally just makes me miserable.

My only explanation is that these posts get pushed to me because they are overwhelmingly popular overall on Twitter, and the high prior swamps out the negative evidence specific to my account.

Of course, the other, more sinister explanation is that it's a (human) editorial decision from Twitter to actively push this kind of content to people, but I find the technical explanation easier to believe.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#75

Post by Fargren »

toyg wrote: post #71
arethuza wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like: "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status." Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...

And you would be correct. Apolitical media doesn't and can't exist. The existence of media is a political statement.

You can restrict partisan media, or identity politics media, or other subsets of politics. But politics as a whole is implicit in every action that involves the public.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#76

Post by scarface74 »

justaguyhere wrote: post #65
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think it…

What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off. FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get fro…

FB has flagged stories that are obviously false for awhile. I deliberately started posting outrageously false stories once Zuckergurg said they wouldn’t flag false posts by politicians.

There was an article recently where someone just copy and pasted posts made by Trump to make a point and their posts got flagged but not the original.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#77

Post by blibble »

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.

no doubt it'll keep "accidentally" getting switched back on

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#78

Post by simion314 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #36
chippy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

I disagree, before the election start here the politicians won't even be sure who will be candidate, then the flyers, walking trough the streets will not happen, there will be no debates on TV. When campaign starts soem peolpe get activated and they will try to promote their favorite party/ person - I am OK with that I would like an option to not see those posts, or an option to hide all posts from this person for the campagin duration. I think this persons think they are doing the right thing and informing people etc I just don't care and when I open FB once a week to see if there is some message for me I would like to see only relevant stuff.

Anyway, here in Romania I do not see many political posts outside electoral campaigns or when the government is doing some shity stuff and people are calling them out , or when some politician says a stupid thing and memes are created about their idiocy(now thinking about it if you have politicians that say a lot of idiotic things often you get a ton of political memes/satire ).

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#79

Post by blueterminal »

justaguyhere wrote: post #65
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think it…

What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off. FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get fro…

> If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to.

Why would they do it? And why would it be better if they did it?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#80

Post by madeofpalk »

toyg wrote: post #71
arethuza wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like: "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status." Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...

You can say that about life

It is an exceptionally privileged situation to be in when you believe you can simply opt out of politics.

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