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Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

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Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#41

Post by hogFeast »

ogre_codes wrote: post #18

This just seems like too little, too late. Much of the problems I see aren't advertising in the traditional sense, but viral content from sketchy sources. If they wanted to seriously affect this, they would prevent posts from spreading to tens of thousands/ millions of people without being vetted.

Yes, it is so simple. News should only come from approved sources. Once the veracity has been checked by a Facebook employee, it is then empirically true or false. I don't know why people in the 21st century cannot understand that all statements are true or false, and that we can place authority for determining truth with companies with known, trusted political allegiances.

For example, I have read a lot about healthcare-for-all not being free. The clue is in the name: "free" healthcare. I can't believe that misinformation, probably spread by insurance companies, has been allowed to spread. Facebook should put a stop to this.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#42

Post by kyrra »

hnaccy wrote: post #35
erichocean wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a good chance we won't know the result of this elect on election night (or possibly within the first week) That's by design.[0] The goal is to have the media and protests decide who wins the election if Trump appears to win on Nov 3rd, using the same playbook currently being run in Belarus as we speak (and that was run successfully in 2014 in Ukraine). Why? It works: we can't have another 4 years of Donald…

>Why? It works: we can't have another 4 years of Donald Trump. If it looks like he might win, we can attack the legitimacy of the vote and install Biden instead. There's been one camp consistently attacking the legitimacy of the election and it's not Biden's.

My take on all of this...

Lots of states are pushing for larger scale vote-by-mail than has ever happened before. Some states have been doing this for a long time (Oregon, Colorado), but they have the processes in place to handle elections. Other states are trying to do it in a few months with no real prep ahead of time. We're already seeing this lead to ballot printing problems, ex:[0].

To build on that, many of these states aren't allowed to even open/proces absentee/vote-by-mail ballots until election day or after[0.5]. That means that problems with these ballots may not be caught ahead of time. Along with that, having to processing millions of ballets (when they are used to 5-digit amounts of ballots), means it will take a lot longer to handle those ballots. This will lead to a delay in knowing the results. As well, mail-in-ballots get rejected at a much higher rate than in-person voting[1], which will lead to lawyers fighting over which ballots are valid if things are close.

Democrats are more likely to vote-by-mail than Republicans[2]. This means those delayed ballots will likely swing towards Biden, which means as days go on for counting, Biden's lead is likely to increase (which is totally fine, but it will definitely stir up controversy).

Then you have lawmakers and judges changes the rules[3]. There are a few cases going on around the country where there is a push to allow late mail ballots to be counted. In this case, a Judge decided to allow ballots to arrive up to 3-days post election. These kinds of cases are going on around the country and still being fought.

It's going to be messy.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-politics/virginia-vo...

[0.5] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-t...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-p...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...

[3] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/pennsylvania-becomes...

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#43

Post by Zak »

marcell wrote: post #32
Zak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is not committed to the principle of free speech in advertising, and prohibits advertisements for a great many things that are legal to advertise.

Whether or not FB has this commitment right now, they should have this commitment. A ban on political ads would go against a hypothetical commitment to the principle of free speech.

Every large advertising platform I can think of has rules about what they will accept that are narrower than what the laws that apply to them require. For example, it's generally legal in the US to advertise firearms, but most large advertising platforms refuse ads for them.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#44

Post by bmarquez »

torben-friis wrote: post #36
ogre_codes wrote: post #18

This just seems like too little, too late. Much of the problems I see aren't advertising in the traditional sense, but viral content from sketchy sources. If they wanted to seriously affect this, they would prevent posts from spreading to tens of thousands/ millions of people without being vetted.

You make an interesting point: what would a social network of limited range look like? Something where you couldn't have more than a set number of connections, things didn't spread more than two nodes in the graph, and resharing wasn't an option. I think it would be ideal to fill in the mainstream need for facebook ( keeping in touch with people)

Social networks could just disable the Share or Retweet button and I think the problem will solve itself.

I miss the old Facebook circa 2007 -- no likes and no shares made it a better experience for me.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#45

Post by vkou »

erichocean wrote: post #38
nl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "the media promotes Biden unopposed" when the most popular media source in the US (Fox) leans the opposite direction is obviously wrong and disappointing to see here.

I don't think Fox News presents any particular difficulty to running the Color Revolution playbook in the US. They're so obviously biased that decent people can (and do) ignore them. What matters is boots on the ground (aka protests) and whatever the legitimate media promotes to the public. That gives politicians (in both parties) the necessary cover to remove Trump from office by force.

About half the country believes that Fox is legitimate media.

Given that legitimacy is exclusively a product of belief, they qualify as a 'legitimate media' source.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#46

Post by vmception »

Profiteer off of unlimited Super PAC spending all year until 3 weeks before the election?

They really think we’re dumb.

The only thing Facebook can do right is to shut the ad and social graph down and deal with private shareholder lawsuits till the end of time.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#47

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bmarquez wrote: post #44
torben-friis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make an interesting point: what would a social network of limited range look like? Something where you couldn't have more than a set number of connections, things didn't spread more than two nodes in the graph, and resharing wasn't an option. I think it would be ideal to fill in the mainstream need for facebook ( keeping in touch with people)

Social networks could just disable the Share or Retweet button and I think the problem will solve itself. I miss the old Facebook circa 2007 -- no likes and no shares made it a better experience for me.

Agreed. Facebook and Twitter really ought to have thought about the long history of chain emails, and realized what they were doing when they added an "all my friends have gotta see this!" button.

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#48

Post by kyrra »

erichocean wrote: post #38
nl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "the media promotes Biden unopposed" when the most popular media source in the US (Fox) leans the opposite direction is obviously wrong and disappointing to see here.

I don't think Fox News presents any particular difficulty to running the Color Revolution playbook in the US. They're so obviously biased that decent people can (and do) ignore them. What matters is boots on the ground (aka protests) and whatever the legitimate media promotes to the public. That gives politicians (in both parties) the necessary cover to remove Trump from office by force.

CNN / MSNBC are the Democrat version. There are some interesting polls on trust of media by political affiliation from 2012[0] and 2019[1] (these are multi-page sites, interesting stats to poke around).

Then pair that with this interesting talk by Matt Taibbi[2]. His basic argument is that most news organizations target a specific demographics and only cover things that reinforce the beliefs of that group. Fox dominates that for conservatives, while liberals tend to have a wider range of organizations to go to.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/09/27/section-4-de...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/09/27/in-changing-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG1qJeDI9Ok

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

vkou wrote: post #45
erichocean wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Fox News presents any particular difficulty to running the Color Revolution playbook in the US. They're so obviously biased that decent people can (and do) ignore them. What matters is boots on the ground (aka protests) and whatever the legitimate media promotes to the public. That gives politicians (in both parties) the necessary cover to remove Trump from office by force.

About half the country believes that Fox is legitimate media. Given that legitimacy is exclusively a product of belief, they qualify as a 'legitimate media' source.

> About half the country believes that Fox is legitimate media.

> Given that legitimacy is exclusively a product of belief, they qualify as a 'legitimate media' source.

If we accept the first part as fact and apply the standard implied by the second, then Fox is in a hazy gray area of equally legitimate and not-legitimate, rather than clearly legitimate.

Which seems (ignoring the people who haven't heard of it or have no opinion) about right:

https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/media-polarization-app...

Re: Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election

#50

Post by nl »

sleavey wrote: post #5
pb7 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$$$

Really? For a few last months of revenue versus potentially stopping an election result from being bought?

The mistake here is thinking that (generally speaking) allowing questionable behavior is a "whole of Facebook" decision.

Instead there is some VP in charge of "ad sales for mid-West US" who looks at their target numbers for a bonus, looks at the ~$100M+ spending planned by the campaigns in that area in the next month[1] and goes "I don't want to sell an election but it is and important free speech issue that campaigns are allowed to get their message across".

Stopping that is a decision that has to be made at the top, by one person who then needs to argue against a lot of people whose financial interest is in the opposite direction.

[1] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/electio...

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