Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give me an example of something businesses do which isn’t political?
Comcast serving everyone. Planned Parenthood not turning away any customer. Airlines allow anybody to fly.
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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
61–70 of 356 posts
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, it's pretty much how campaigns here in Germany work. There's about a few weeks of campaigning during which political posters and so on can be put up, but otherwise there's strict regulation on political ads. Also the parties are significantly publicly financed and the amount of money is much lower, due to the much shorter campaign span, making the process much more egalitarian. For example the largest party in G…
How does that work with FB? Let’s say you have a German politician with a subreddit about him. Does that not count as advertising? I’m genuinely curious because I’m certain your country has at least considered this scenario.
Up until now there hasn't really been laws addressing social media which falls outside of what is considered "Rundfunk" (basically television and radio mainly), but over the last year or two a lot of people have started demanding to apply the existing laws to social media as well. I think at the moment they're only required to label paid political ads.
Culturally though it has a greatly diminished role. If I remember correctly, during the last European election the largest parties spent about 500k on social media ads. We're still overwhelmingly dominated by traditional media. Angela Merkel has no social media presence, and if I had to guess even the most popular politicians maybe have a few ten or maybe a hundred thousand followers on Twitter.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#63We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.
This situation appears to me to be corporations freely associating and/or choosing to do business, or not to do business, with other corporations. No government coercion involved in either forcing or blocking this behavior. In other words, the libertarian ideal of the future. I don't see the problem. The fact that this behavior isn't universally celebrated is an example of why libertarianism fails in the real world.…
Wait, where did this become a referendum on libertarianism? Nothing in the parent comment suggests this.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're calling the democratic process is simply people willing to spend capital on a cause. It's just that their capital is time (and time is money). It doesn't make them any holier, and there's nothing morally or ethically superior about having to "organize people" without spending money. Put another way, I may be able to exert my political voice using money and I am not less deserving of having my opinion hear…
“Time is money” is a cliche, not a fact. There are plenty of people who have lots of money but didn’t spend commensurate time getting it, as there are plenty of people who spend inordinate amounts of time making little money.
Sure. You can earn more money per unit of time by creating greater value for others. But my point is that saying "political spending is bad" doesn't make sense. Everyone is expending unequal efforts in different facets of their life. If I am busy keeping my small business afloat and can't afford to put in the kind of time a dedicated activist puts into organizing, I think I should still be able to use what resources I have to influence politics.
Otherwise, what we're saying is that everyone must dedicate significant portions of their life to on-the-ground organizing and direct action to be on an even footing relative to others. That doesn't sound like the kind of society most would want to live in. It means we'd need to forego other activities, both economic ones and leisure, just to engage in this artificially constrained political system.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#65Many of the comments in this thread do not understand the concept of free speech from a legal perspective. Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want. on a side note - these are super dog whistle comments, and I'm surprised the mods are ok with them.
>Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want.
Most people understand this. It doesn't need to keep being repeated in every thread.
Facebook isn't bobsmessageboard.com. The debate is over whether it is a de facto public communications utility and should be regulated as such, or if it is private company that is free to do whatever it wants on it's platform.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#66We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.
That's a good start! But what we really want is for Facebook to go out of business.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#67Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business. All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.
>Sounds like Verizon’s Facebook advertising spend is losing value because if COVId-19 “We’re pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable,” Doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with Covid-19 to me but rather advertisers don’t want to spend money advertising on a platform promoting hate speech. But let’s say this was a conspiracy by all these companies to save…
I see it as a "kill two birds" situation. Corporate ethics is a very different beast from human ethics. Getting any decision through a board room typically requires at least two entirely plausible value propositions.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#68So in this case, the enemy of my enemy is or is not my friend?
More like "politics makes strange bedfellows", Charles Dudley Warner [0]
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#69We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.
the whole point of a democracy is to give the people what the want
That is definitely not the "whole point" of democracy.
Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott
#70We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.
the whole point of a democracy is to give the people what the want
Not exactly. That’s why democracy doesn’t promote lynchings for example, and why US sets term limits on its presidents even if they are popular.