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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

#141

Post by fbelzile »

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.

I actually took this a step further and un-followed all of my friends. It took me more than a few hundred clicks, but Facebook now shows me a completely empty news feed. There's no ads either, although I'm not sure if that's because of uBlock Origin or if it's because there's not enough posts to stick ads in-between.

As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#142

Post by tenebrisalietum »

bhaavan wrote: post #54
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…

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…

> classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial.

There's probably a set of 50 or so keyword combinations, plus the names of current and former politicians and common misspellings, that would cover 90% of cases.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#145

Post by AlexMax »

macspoofing wrote: post #128
piva00 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

> 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). That's not even remotely true. The Atlantic put together snippets of political ads over decades [1]. It's pretty crazy stuff. The local stuff, just from personal memory, was even crazier, frequently assert…

> The problem is that even that perspective is your personal bias which you're using to justify censorship

To clarify, are you asserting that hiding political advertisements - either by not allowing them like Twitter or by giving people an option to opt-out like Facebook - is censorship?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#146

Post by macspoofing »

ses1984 wrote: post #136
macspoofing wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Politics in the US is a mess. Why would you want it any other way? Democracy is messy. >You are saying this as if those ads state facts and stick to the issues I'm not saying that at all, but I will say this, political discourse is never about facts and policy. Same with activism. Do you think activists stick to facts and data to prove their case? Almost never. Do you think any housing activists that push 'rent cont…

>Why would you want it any other way? Democracy is messy. Sounds an awful lot like giving up to me. >Do you think activists stick to facts and data to prove their case? Almost never. There's a difference between "appeal to emotion" and spewing outright lies.

>Sounds an awful lot like giving up to me

No! The opposite in fact! When Democracy is messy it means there's a lot of 'bumping' and 'turn' (to use some metaphors), unlike the sterile utopia that some push for, where everything is clean and specified and everyone follows a neat pattern (to use more metaphors). For example, I love how messy caucuses are, people are yelling and clamouring, convincing each other to join the other side, negotiating and trading (TALKING to each other), making mistakes, etc. Democratic chaos! Beautiful! But they are going away to just regular, boring voting because this chaos makes many people uncomfortable and it FEELS better to have a top-down, clean, organized, designed approach.

This reminds me of Jane Jacobs [1], an urban activist that criticized the then modern notions of urban renewal which called for creating neat, sterile, single-purpose zoned areas. To her, a city should be 'messy' with active mixed-use neighbourhoods encouraging this 'bumping' and 'mixing'. She's right! And I see this idea of urban planning analogous to the democratic process.

There is a side-benefit to this chaotic Democracy - it's harder to be gamed, by Russians or political consultants or political parties.

>There's a difference between "appeal to emotion" and spewing outright lies.

The other side feels the same about your side.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#147

Post by spoopyskelly »

ubertaco wrote: post #127

As long as this is an opt-out setting, and not a community standard, this is a cop-out. The problem is not "our poor users are bombarded with untrue political ads!" The problem is that Facebook has become a cesspool that breeds conspiracy theories and communities of disinformation and denial the same way that stagnant swampwater breeds mosquitoes and other harmful pests. Its tight-knit havens of the willfully disinfo…

Why should they block content you don't like? Move to another platform.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#148

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#149

Post by Dumblydorr »

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…

I don't think you can equate FB and traditional media and then honestly ponder why people are upset. Traditional media ads weren't paid for in rubles by Putin's agents. Traditional ads weren't being approved by the most dangerous CEO in modern times. Traditional media didn't lead to the most terrible president in history. Clearly we are in a different world than the strawman traditional media, FB is a whole new monstrosity.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#150

Post by cheschire »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #138
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…

The problem isn't the cultural bubbles; the problem is that there are apparently only two bubbles, which quickly boils down to "you're with us or you're against us". This is not a technological problem or a filter bubble problem, but a core issue with how US politics is currently organized. With sweeping political reform, you can have dozens of parties active, each representing a much more fine-grained selection of t…

The US would require multiple votes as well to really succeed at this. For example in Germany a person has 2 votes, and that enables them to perhaps use one vote to support a moderate-left party like SPD who they want to be a strong opposition party, but then at the same time vote for a far-right party like AfD.

Maybe the voter's issue is the power of CDU? Maybe they're just anti-establishment? Maybe they're just voting on specific issues?

Who knows, but it's way better than only being able to put your stamp on one party, and gives a little more negotiating power to the smaller parties when forming coalitions.

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