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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

#361

Post by cwhiz »

avalys wrote: post #287
cwhiz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because voters are too stupid to tell fact from fiction, and need their betters to protect them from misinformation and make sure they are only exposed to approved viewpoints?

Every single person is susceptible to manipulation. If you have enough data points you can manipulate someone. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence or “smarts.”

I would argue that there is actually an inverse relationship between how susceptible you are to manipulation and how susceptible you think you are.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#362

Post by Reedx »

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.

I would say that social media generally is the biggest threat.

However, I find it hard to believe that ads are even remotely the real problem (though they're part of it). They're not nearly as effective at influencing people as friends/journalists/etc and the methods social media uses to reward and elevate angry, tribal content. An endless stream of confirmation bias and strawmen, mostly from other users. Ads are a small part of that river, more likely to be ignored/blocked and more likely to be understood as fiction vs other content. They do have an effect of course, but it seems to be greatly overstated.

Also remember the unprecedented $500M ad experiment Bloomberg ran to little effect. Would $50B even have done the trick? I would bet not.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#363

Post by grecy »

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.

It's nice you can do that, but Facebook has 19 million other ads they're happy to show.... so it's still crap if you see any ads.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#364

Post by AbrahamParangi »

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…

I don't think it's always a shibboleth, many people use Democrat as the demonym adjective form because of the obvious confusion otherwise. Seen it both ways.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#365

Post by cpmsmith »

johnpaulkiser wrote: post #360
cwhiz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Democracy is inherently broken if you think people can be controlled in this way.

A lot of money is spent based on the assumption that they can—it's not a great situation even if the assumption were wrong. The worst form of government, except for the others.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#366

Post by [deleted] »

elicash wrote: post #219
schuyler2d wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed -- quite the timely response: Allow people to turn off ads advocating racial justice and equity.

This is a great point. Will a person who turns these ads off even UNDERSTAND that they're not allowing a Black Lives Matter organization to let them know about upcoming events? How will that be explained to the user? The advertiser might only even be sharing the ads with people set up on a recurring contribution to inform them how to stay involved.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#367

Post by [deleted] »

elicash wrote: post #241
vorpalhex wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be ok with the inverse situation? You could allow ads from an organization you'd support, but you'd also be allowing ads from organizations contrary to your own beliefs?

That's literally the status quo. Yes, I probably favor that over this. My point is three-fold: 1. There's no education about what this actually means. This has been pitched as during the 2020 election, hide ads from candidates. But it's not that. The coverage is unclear and it's unlikely Facebook will fully explain. 2. There's no flexibility to let people change the settings how they truly wish. Maybe I want to hear…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#368

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#369

Post by amelius »

Spivak wrote: post #200
amelius wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is the least of our worries. We need a system where running a successful political campaign does not depend on how much money you bring. Each candidate should have the same budget and so equal amount of exposure.

I don't know how you do this fairly without infringing on non-political candidates right to free speech. It seems a little nuts that I'm not allowed to endorse my preferred candidate because my endorsement has value and my candidate hit their cap.

Simple. Suspend the right to loud forms of free speech during political campaigns.

Or have an independent panel measure the media exposure of each candidate. Then compensate them accordingly.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#370

Post by js2 »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #364
dragonwriter wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think it's always a shibboleth, many people use Democrat as the demonym adjective form because of the obvious confusion otherwise. Seen it both ways.

Whenever it's not obvious from context during spoken language, the traditional way of being clear is to say "small-d democratic ...". It's always clear from capitalization in written form.
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