This is a good start. I always thought it would be great to have a "no X today" button, where I could mute all political content, all sports content, all WWDC content, etc.
Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
151–160 of 510 posts
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#152As 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.
More specifically, why does one get to decide what content another person sees, on a platform?
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#153Facebook 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…
Why doesn't Google do it? They already have gmail and chrome, I could see Googledex heavily populated from their existing data.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#154Earlier 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…
> 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.
If that's the route we want to take, I think a browser extension would work just fine. Loop over all divs that represent tweets, if contains any key words, delete div. Rise and repeat with other websites.
I wonder if a general black list exists for various websites already.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Echo chambers are also chosen by users, though. They choose who to friend, follow, un follow, like, block, etc. In a broader sense, people have media habits that are fueled by their own views, I doubt a trumpism follower would choose to read NYT or WaPo. There is some personal agency here.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#156It'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 current US electoral system makes this practically impossible. You'd need widespread adoption of PR or similar. A FPTP system, like nearly all US states use, essentially ensures that there will only be two viable parties (there are occasional cases where such systems lead to a 2.5 party system for historical reasons, as with the UK's Liberal Democrats, descendants of the defunct Liberal Party, one of the previous two parties).
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#157It'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…
You are saying this as if those ads state facts and stick to the issues. Politics in the US is a mess. Party politics makes absolutely no sense to me. My trust in what they have to say, particularly on social media, is nil. Those ads will be turned off. I have never have, nor never will, vote along party lines. I am, proudly, unaffiliated.
If you want to be effective and create change, you need to engage with party politics and push one (or both?) parties in a particular direction.
Voting in party primaries and advocating for change within parties, given the state of affairs in US politics, is a better bet for effective change than maintaining a stance of moral purity.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#158Facebook? What is that?
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#159Political 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?
So, before social media, this wasn't regulated by law, but it was to a large extent regulated by the media. Politicians didn't have a good way to lie directly to the public; their main avenue for lying to the public was via the media, which would tend to fact check them.
There's a big difference between "candidate X says that pigs can fly and this is why that's wrong", and "The flying pigs above your house are bigly bad", as far as public messaging goes. Social media has enabled the latter, and it's kind of an unsolved problem. Social media has also caused a major blurring between advertisement and content, which doesn't help.
EDIT: An interesting/worrying byproduct of this seems to be that parts of the media are going further and further off-piste, and letting complete _nonsense_ go by without the "and here's why that's wrong" bit. A glaring recent example was parts of the US right-wing media absolutely tying itself in knots to explain why Trump's rambling about disinfectants for treatment of COVID in humans made sense. It's just really hard to imagine this happening 20 years ago.
Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts
#160It'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 monst…
Question: how many rubles were used to pay for US political ads in the 2016 election?