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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

#251

Post by skybrian »

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…

How many Facebook ads even target people in the opposite party? I have only seen fundraising ads for Democrats. The ads seem to be reinforcing cultural bubbles.

It seems like targeting people committed to the other side wouldn't be a good use of campaign funds? With low voter participation rates, there is a lot more to be gained from increasing turnout for your own side.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#252

Post by Balgair »

giarc wrote: post #244
tlrobinson wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democrats will block Republican ads, Republicans will block Democrat ads I could be wrong, but it sounds like you can just turn off all political ads, not those from specific parties.

Not to mention you already could accomplish this by blocking ads from those specific parties... just like you could block ads from a company.

I think this highlights another issue with this: How many people even know that they can do this, something already implemented?

Of the people that use FB, some percent won't even know that they can block ads from anyone, let alone political ones. Taking only the political ads into account, you then bifurcate the population into those that turn them off, and those that don't know to in the first place.

We've been dealing (poorly) with these filter bubbles already, adding in more filtering may not be the solution here.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#253

Post by vharuck »

cwhiz wrote: post #161
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…

You can target Facebook ads with surgical precision to manipulate people exactly the way you want. This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did. You cannot target people with such precision in traditional advertising. I don’t think it’s unfair to say social media advertising and data collection is the biggest risk to democracy that we have ever faced.

In my opinion, surgically precise targeting was not the problem with Cambridge Analytica. The problems were:

1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms.

2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service.

I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging.

As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#254

Post by naravara »

kuzimoto wrote: post #221
adventured wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed. The echo chambers haven't gotten worse at all. They've become easier to observe in action and quantify, because social media is leaving a giant digital trail that everyone can observe (whereas previously the average person didn't leave much of a partisan trail/record for observation or study or reporting). The perception that…

I think there is a case to be made that it has gotten worse. For example, before social media a lot of social interaction happened in public areas with a more diverse group of people. With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement…

> it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism

"Reverting" implies it ever left. Is it not possible that our media system, in the past, just enforced uniformity to effectively create one tribe of people who consumed it and excluded everyone else? As the environment gets more diverse, then the existing tribalism, and the conflicts it engenders, just become more evident.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#256

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

adventured wrote: post #181
throwawaygh wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The targeted precision really is what's different. Your candidate can be N different single-issue candidates in a way that's just not possible without precise targeting. The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed.

> The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed. The echo chambers haven't gotten worse at all. They've become easier to observe in action and quantify, because social media is leaving a giant digital trail that everyone can observe (whereas previously the average person didn't leave much of a partisan trail/record for observation or study or reporting). The perception that…

One way it may have gotten worse is the perception that it’s not there. If I’m hanging out with friends and we all agree, it’s obvious we’re just a small group. When all the top votes posts on reddit or twitter agree with my leanings, it’s much easier to think that random tens of millions of internet users must be more representative. With some of the upvote dynamics, it probably won’t even be representative of their own whole userbase. It’s so easy to forget that if like 51% of users have a view which they comment and upvote, downvoting the rest, then all the top comments might end up agreeing and you’ll never see the views of the 49% unless you scroll a mile down. (Then you get another headline that causes maybe 2% change their minds or not click through and the 51:49 flips to 49:51 and looks like the whole community flipped around and is totally hypocritical.)

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#258

Post by naravara »

bhupy wrote: post #232
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not contesting the conclusion. But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling. (Not to mention NYT is squarely center right, politically. "Left" of the GOP but not left in any meaningful sense.)

Lots to unpack here. 1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point . If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this partic…

> Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views.

Even breaking views down as "social" and "economic" encodes a lot of biases. In reality political views seem to align more based on a matrix of dimensions like "openness to novel experiences" or "preference for structure/stability." The system we use often surprises people with how often the Individualist Lefties (of the hippie variety) and Far Right align on both social and economic policy. It turns out their main differences are just about things like sexual mores and recreational drug use, but the general orientation on most other dynamics is the same. They just end up on different ends of the spectrum because of how factional alliances manifest in our political system.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#259

Post by brownbat »

wffurr wrote: post #157
blueatlas wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I don't see why this would necessarily be true. Unaligned votes decide elections, while deeply partisan groups can generally be assumed safe and disregarded. Turnout boosting is a thing, but not generally through policy concessions. Turnout operations are much more about rallying people who already agree with you.

I might be wrong, but my strong hunch is that if you have an hour to spend, volunteering at a party call center is going to pale in comparison to just writing a carefully worded letter to your representative on a specific issue you care about.

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