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

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#441

Post by ogre_codes » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

akincisor wrote: post #435

ogre_codes wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political. You are over-thinking this. Just filtering obvious political stuff would be a massive help: - Mentions of politicians - Key words: Liberal, Conservative, Right-wing, etc etc - Material re-shared from political parties/ candidates/ movements. Just that would be a giant help. Allowing users to set their own filters would be a mass…

So any post that has "... a liberal amount..." or "... take the conservative approach ..." or "... replaced the right wing nut..." would be filtered. Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name. For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting…

I'd be fine if any post with references to "liberal amounts", "conservative approaches", or "right wing nut" was excised because my friends don't talk that way when they are posting pictures of their kids or the bike they just bought.

> For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong.

As with most flippant axioms and generalities this catch-phrase is quite often just wrong. Often there are simple solutions that are just fine.

I used Facebook Purity for quite a while and set up simple keyword based filters and while they weren't perfect, it was a lot better than the default feed.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#442

Post by catalogia » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #373

I'd also love a feature that lets me block non-advertising political content. A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That's not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc. Some people push it so far that the solution of unfriending them is easy. But not everybody is so egregious that I want the nuclear option. (For example, relatives who are vocal abo…

A simple naive bayesian text classifier (e.g. A Plan for Spam) run client-side as a userscript should be more than capable of doing what you want. It would be nice if websites had this sort of client-side filtering feature built in, fully controlled by the user, for transparency reasons.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#443

Post by AftHurrahWinch » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

r29vzg2 wrote: post #433

three_seagrass wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has ethical reprecussions on the news ecosystem because whichever keywords/mentions that Facebook dictates as political will be targeted by news organizations to avoid. These organizations will strip normal news of any political connotations which is frightening because the news, although mostly a pile of noise today, is supposed to have signals to keep democracies in line by design.

I would argue that stripping news of political connotations would be a plus. I wish all news was reported this way.

One of the suggested political connotations is "Mentions of politicians". You would argue that news should be reported without "Mentions of politicians"?

If you disagree with that definition of political connotation, how do you define political connotations?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#444

Post by Der_Einzige » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

rlt wrote: post #399

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…

> 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 If true that's petty, but on the other hand, is the Democratic party actually any more "democratic" than the Republican party? (current president's authoritarian tendencies notwithstanding)

Which one of them likes the electoral college?

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#445

Post by banads » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #328

banads wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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). Watch The Great Hack. It's not about targeting people who are thoroughly entrenched in their views like you. It's about targeting swing voters >If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show…

> Watch The Great Hack. 1. I've watched it. 2. You need to actually summarize here why it corroborates your argument. If I am attempting to refute your point of view, "Google it" is an extremely unconvincing line of argument. 3. Again, I provided you my sources directly, which show that it has already been reported that CA's impact on the 2016 election has been greatly overstated. > It's about targeting swing voters…

>You cannot conflate persuasion with "buying votes".

You don't think money is persuasive?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#446

Post by chillwaves » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #441

akincisor wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So any post that has "... a liberal amount..." or "... take the conservative approach ..." or "... replaced the right wing nut..." would be filtered. Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name. For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting…

I'd be fine if any post with references to "liberal amounts", "conservative approaches", or "right wing nut" was excised because my friends don't talk that way when they are posting pictures of their kids or the bike they just bought. > For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. As with most flippant axioms and generalities this catch-phrase is quite often just wrong. Often there are simple solution…

Honestly, sounds like social media just isn't for you or you have a friend's group that you need to curate.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#447

Post by freehunter » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #427

thrwawy0601858 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ones who persist after correction are doing it intentionally and tactically, though. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with depriving Democrats of their consciously manipulative branding and their unearned rhetorical monopoly on 'Democracy'. To suggest otherwise speaks volumes about one's desire to control language, and a rather anti-Democratic disposition.

Did you make a throwaway just to post these?

Which is absolutely against the HN guidelines:

>HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#448

Post by prepend » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #185

Dumblydorr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't Google do it? They already have gmail and chrome, I could see Googledex heavily populated from their existing data.

isn't Google Contacts a digital Rolodex? What you're describing sounds like white pages.

Google contacts has the downside of inserting everyone’s birthday into my calendar. I can’t remove a birthday from a contact once Google knows it. Super annoying and a dumb example of trying to use shared cloud data instead of my locally curated contacts list.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#449

Post by prepend » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #135

prepend wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t figured out how to run ublock on my phone.

On android, one can use facebook in the firefox mobile browser instead of the app. Firefox mobile does allow ublock origin, and it's trivial to add a home shortcut to any web app. This has other advantages: facebook web site can't ask for a 1000 permissions or to be updated regularly, won't run in the background eating memory and battery and this will limit the disk space it can eat. You're paying the price with a le…

I’m on iOS so this isn’t an option. There are tradeoffs, but I rarely use Facebook and it’s one of the few native apps I’d rather use than the browser interface.

Re: Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

#450

Post by DenisM » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

elicash wrote: post #432

DenisM wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will a person who turns these ads off even UNDERSTAND that they're not allowing Do you not find this approach patronizing? I'm not jesting, your comments are well-informed and I am better off for having read them. Still I am curious why is it that you do not believe that people can make reasonable choices about content blocking and correctly interpret "sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the ou…

It's a fair question. But it's because the news reporting about it has been incorrect and has often suggested that it only applies to campaigns. That's why. I'm using reporters as a proxy for the public. And also, much of the public will learn about the feature from these reports. As a political advertiser who jumps through huge hoops about what is and isn't allowed, what the definitions of different terms are, and h…

I understand your frustration and I wouldn’t want to be in your place right now.

Still in my place I want a button to make the madness stop.

So the two of us are fighting over that button. Something went wrong somewhere.

Perhaps we need a better way of spreading the word - still possible to reach people, but hard to spam so as not to poison the stream (once again).