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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

#111

Post by braythwayt »

ClutchBand wrote: post #46
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…

American politics became Americans nightly entertainment, its a saturated behemoth with an insatiable appetite. It will not be long until election campaigns are non-stop. There's simply too much money in this game.

Any time you can spend a half a trillion dollars without accountability, you have a massive incentive to spend all of your time either trying to obtain that power, or trying to defend it.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#112

Post by chrisandchips »

coding_lobster wrote: post #105
prepend wrote: post #95

Facebook 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.

Doesn't such a feature contribute to the creation of echo chambers? It's hard to tell when it comes to something like ads as they usually aren't a great source of information.

I suppose it does, but I feel like echo chambers are more dangerous when people don't necessarily realize they've entered one (e.g. when all of your FB friends only share posts centered around a particular political view).

I feel like there's less danger here since one needs to manually click that they don't want to see a particular type of content

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#113

Post by raxxorrax »

toyg wrote: post #69
justaguyhere wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People are not born “ignorantly arguing”, they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints. This switch could help reduce that phenomenon a bit. But I agree that it should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and I say that as an extremely politically-aware individual. Politics is important but it doesn’t work well on Facebook and should be discouraged there.

> they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints

I don't think this holds up to any scrutiny to be honest. There are certainly some cases where people are easily influenced, but I don't think it is that significant. Only from a worldview that puts you way above others. Aside from the problem of defining extremism, people do make choices.

I think what many people observe about conduct on social media is a form of desensitization for that matter and there are different reasons for that.

But this is actually testable, by identifying this propaganda and identifying people affected by it. We had that topic with Russians that supposedly influenced a massive amount of people with extremism for an election. But if propaganda is in place, you can identify it by words, images or statements. You can see this with ISIS. There were some poeple that indeed fell for it, but probably not by facebook adds. These people were actively groomed.

Wanting to control content by large ad corporations can also be seen as extremism, especially in the context of the free internet.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#115

Post by bhupy »

jka wrote: post #58

What we may be witnessing here is Facebook introducing a feature that allows them to delay and block legal complaints and requests related to questionable political advertising and influence (whether domestic or foreign). This feature presumably wouldn't prevent those cases from concluding eventually, but introducing it now could mean that it'd be difficult for jurisdictions (local, state or federal) to prepare and a…

> introducing it now could mean that it'd be difficult for jurisdictions (local, state or federal) to prepare and apply meaningful regulations over what Facebook should permit in terms of election-related advertising.

What kind of regulation could a US jurisdiction apply that wouldn’t violate the Constitution?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#116

Post by moron4hire »

prepend wrote: post #95

Facebook 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.

What are you talking about? Twitter lets you block advertiser accounts. I would say Twitter is better about it, because they just let me block the account. Facebook makes (or rather, used to make) me go through several steps of "are you sure? wouldn't you rather just hide this person? what if you asked them nicely first?" bullshit.

And after doing it a few times (maybe two dozen?), suddenly the block feature was gone completely. I have hundreds of accounts blocked on Twitter.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#117

Post by piva00 »

macspoofing wrote: post #109

It's a good feature from an individual perspective. It's not a good feature if you don't like cultural bubbles forming. Democrats will block Republican ads, Republicans will block Democrat ads - will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa? I find this focus (attack?) on political advertising on social media platforms by traditional media companies to be self-serving and…

It can be one motive but it's not the only one. Can be the driver for a lot of actors attacking social media but we can't deny that social media has enabled a lot of new techniques for reaching an audience in a much easier and rapid platform than ever before. Those techniques have been twisted into the range of untruthfulness that we couldn't have seen before in the old media because moderation was much more strict (and papers depended on some kind of respectability).

The closest we had to this in the past were tabloids but people could more easily categorise those than the thousands of "Truth News Online"-esque articles peddled on social media. It's an extreme torrent of an old issue, we scaled it up.

Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...

So yes, money might be a shady motive behind this hunt but there is also quite a lot of damage that we haven't yet found a way to deal with. And it's causing very real problems, in real life, right now.

Not that these problems were caused directly by social media but they are adding fuel to the fire and it only seems to be increasing now when having checks on them becomes another divisive subject and added as another single-issue partisan bullshit.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#118

Post by moron4hire »

coding_lobster wrote: post #105
prepend wrote: post #95

Facebook 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.

Doesn't such a feature contribute to the creation of echo chambers? It's hard to tell when it comes to something like ads as they usually aren't a great source of information.

Echo chambers are deliberately created by the platform according to what they think will keep the user on the site. It is fundamentally anti-user. This is the person self-selecting what they want to see. It's a very different thing.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#119

Post by BiteCode_dev »

prepend wrote: post #95

Facebook 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.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just use ublock origin?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#120

Post by bhupy »

cosmodisk wrote: post #102
nradov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you propose to fix that? Should candidates only be allowed to make "true" statements?

It's a complex issue but having some sort of mechanism where you can't just say:'Poland will attack the US next year,we need to prepare for it!!' and then move on as nothing happened, would help. In the the same way as CEOs can't just walk around talking whatever shit they want to just because they've got fiduciary responsibility,some good practices could be applied to candidates.

NYT v Sullivan renders it impossible to legislate this (short of a Constitutional amendment)
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