I can see how this will stop people being irritated by political adverts they don't like, but I don't see how this addresses the claim that dishonest political adverts are skewing the democratic process.
Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
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Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#92I 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.
> 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. Wouldn't that disproportionately remove only young urban democrats from political advertising? also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?
> also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?
Well, did you read the first two sentences of the article?
> Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters.
The USA Today article is easily located: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-v...
My conclusion is that Hacker News has a bias in favor of a news source like the BBC over a news source like USA Today which is strong enough to overcome USA Today having the original story yet have the BBC article be the one voted up.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#93I 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.
Facebook is the least of our worries. We need a system where running a successful political campaign does not depend on how much money you bring. Each candidate should have the same budget and so equal amount of exposure.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#94Political adverts isn't the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn't be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there's not much hope for any ON/OFF settings on social media.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#95Facebook has a really interesting feature that I haven’t seen in Twitter, Google, or others. I can block all ads from a page.
Whenever I see a political ad, I can choose “don’t show me any more ads from XXX” and it actually works. This was a godsend during the primary and I wish was available in other platforms.
I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#96Political adverts isn't the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn't be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there's not much hope for any ON/OFF settings on social media.
How would you propose to fix that? Should candidates only be allowed to make "true" statements?
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#97Facebook wants to be seen to address its perceived interference in politics. Particularly ahead of the upcoming election cycle. It wants to do this without hamstringing its ad-revenue. Let's look at what the measures are - -an opt-out option for political ads: "The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organ…
This seems to be more than print, radio, and television are doing?
I wish there was a way to turn this off for tv or youtube.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#98Earlier 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.
Just because something has a slightly vague definition and can touch upon most things in life doesn't mean its definition must be stretched to encompass literally everything.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#99Political adverts isn't the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn't be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there's not much hope for any ON/OFF settings on social media.
How would you propose to fix that? Should candidates only be allowed to make "true" statements?
This wouldn't completely fix the problem, but I think it would help to not allow candidates to make factually false statements.
That is to say: there may not be a way to objectively say whether a given statement is true, but it is possible to objectively say that some statements are false.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think it’s the flavor of money from a campaign finance perspective.
If I’m using campaign donations and run an ad on climate change, it’s political.
If I’m Nike and run an ad for climate change, it’s non-political. Unless it runs afoul of the FEC.