Facebook to let users turn off political adverts • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#311

Post by naravara » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #280

naravara wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed. Echo chambers always did, but I think the bubble-forming dynamic we have now is a bit different. It's not that I have my own views echoed back to me by the communities I'm in all the time, it's that so much of my exposure to opposing views is often coming from some of the dumbest and most unhinged people on Earth. It's the fil…

> I think one of the big ones is that our intellectual institutions have given themselves over to internet troll logic, including many prestigious Op-Ed pages Yes, absolutely. The prevalence of stupid "both sides" reasoning calls into being the contrarians and gives them a platform - in order to have someone say the world is round, you have to find a flat earth pundit as well and put them opposite each other so the p…

>At least the Unabomber wrote his own deranged manifesto

To be fair he was given an elite education and was, by many accounts, an actual genius and math prodigy. Most people don't clear that bar.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#312

Post by minikites » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #301

This may sound positive (less ads, less disinformation) at first glance, but I think it's actually a terrible and dangerous development. Zuck has seen that he's going to get hate no matter what his political content moderation policy is, so he thinks he can escape that by literally escaping from it: letting users just turn it off. But while he has the legal right to, in the larger societal sense it's dangerously and…

>The ability to close yourself off in a bubble where you can't be reached by opposing viewpoints is relinquishing your duties as a democratic citizen.

This is only true if each side has a valid and reasonable difference of opinion. This is not true for hate speech and other propaganda. For example, it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to say that people with dark skin are subhuman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#313

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #246

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.)

http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/G... Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.

> NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.

It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist, which is a center-right position (the same center-right position which was held by the dominant factions of both US political parties in the neoliberal consensus of the early 1990s, though the Republican Party has since shifted further Right, and the center-left faction has been gaining ground in the Democratic Party in the last several years.)

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#314

Post by dfxm12 » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #230

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 is if you turn off all ads, you won't see any alternative points. I don't need Biden ads because I already will vote for Biden, so I turn off political ads. That's it I'm back in my bubble. This is a cop-out for actually having to verify/review political ads. Zuckerburg is really really good at the art of seeming like he is progressive but is empirically horrible for society.

Zuckerburg is really really good at the art of seeming like he is progressive but is empirically horrible for society.

Is he good at the art of seeming progressive?

He's hosted fundraisers for Chris Christie, his lobbying group FWD.us had created a GOP-led spin off called "Americans for a Conservative Direction" that supported the keystone XL pipeline, and the decidedly non-progressive politicians Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

So when I hear people say stuff like "Facebook has a liberal bias" or that Zuckerberg himself is progressive, I'm genuinely puzzled.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#315

Post by minikites » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

>will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

We've lived in this world since 2016, if not earlier. The question is how to proceed from here.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#316

Post by amznthrwaway » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #289

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…

> Republicans will block Democrat ads - will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa? The piece indicates that there will be an option off political ads entirely, not to block political ads by partisan affiliation. (The latter is both more complex to even superficially inplement and would be rather ineffective because SuperPAC ads are formally unaffiliated with either pa…

Yes, but Republicans consistently use the term 'Democrat' instead of 'Democratic' because they don't want to imply that Democrats have a connection to the concept of Democracy.

It's a shibboleth; folks who instinctively say "Democrat" are reliably far-right.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#317

Post by bhupy » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

banads wrote: post #292

bhupy wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they see that fundraising for reelection is their #1 goal, full stop. A minor nit pick: I think you're correct that reelection is their #1 goal, but fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically.

>fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically. False, see Cambridge Analytica.

> False, see Cambridge Analytica.

Um, elaborate? You literally cannot buy votes. If I'm a left wing progressive, no amount of money will convince me to vote for a right wing politician (and vice versa).

Also, by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated.

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/

From the article:

“But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”

If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show me what that system is, and I'll try and use it to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#318

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

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…

Crackpot movements used to require you have personal contact with the core members or have access to a newsletter. Now, impressionable people can just find them on FB, Reddit, or *chan.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#319

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

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.

With twitter you can block the user that prompoted the tweet and you won't see any tweets, promoted or other wise from them.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#320

Post by throwawaygh » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

dx87 wrote: post #268

kuzimoto wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've had older coworkers say the same thing. They said that when your social circle was usually your coworkers and neighbors, you had to make an effort to get along, and if you had any sort of extreme viewpoints, you had to remember that there were real life consequences to everything you said. Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same…

> They said that when your social circle was usually your coworkers and neighbors, you had to make an effort to get along

People still have neighbors and coworkers.

> Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.

The choice to isolate yourself in a like-minded bubble was always available.

On the right: most church communities in small midwestern/southern towns will make social media bubbles look like veritable cornucopias of diversity. Or if you have to live in a larger metro, you can very easily find pockets of people who all attend the same church, work for the same few employers, live in the same zip-code, etc. At my first employer (small finance company in the rural midwest) I joined a church because it was the only way to fit in. I think it's fair to say that the majority of the private K12 schools in the USA and the majority of the home-schooling community are explicitly about isolating your family from the out-group.

On the left: same thing. Live in the city, in particular neighborhoods within the city, send your kids to the right montessori, attend a liberal mainline church (or no church), etc.

I don't think there are more people isolating themselves in bubbles. It's just way easier and far less painful to moan about social media than to point out that a huge fraction of our built world and social infrastructure has the effect of forming various types of bubbles.

Social bubbles make it hard to maintain a huge coalition, because disagreeing with any one part of the hive mind can make life in the bubble unbearable even if you are happy with 90% of the other stuff (e.g., if you're socially and fiscally conservative except that you're openly gay, then the rural midwest church is probably a bubble you'll leave). Precise targeted and personalized advertising doesn't have that attribute.