Other countries have rules about political advertisement especially before elections. Those include budget limits, content, attribution, locations, and more. It's weird to think the rules are so lax here.
An advertising ban ahead of an election feels like a logical solution, or at least a simple-to-understand one. People would try and circumvent it still but the burden would be on the ad vendors to not be liable for a violation.
And if they don't want to risk liability, they always have the option to not show any ads to the relevant population ahead of an election.
>Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the…
There are a significant number of tech workers I know that do genuinely believe that companies should leverage their technology to benefit the candidates that they feel would be better for the country, and do things like ban Trump's social media accounts. This is what Bosworth was addressing: > But he maintained that the company should not change its policies on political advertising, saying that doing so in order to…
Banning Trump's social media accounts wouldn't require bias against him, it would simply require him to stop receiving special exemption from platform rules.
I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific pol…
> it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms I'm going to have to contradict you there. Anyone who was following the 2016 Russian Interference campaign, and related news stories, would know that Facebook used to pay people to moderate news stories, perhaps in a manner that was like a news room... But then they fired those people because they were not promoting conspiracy theory news stories,…
> As the [2] reference says, unless FB has suddenly grown a backbone with regards for truth over dollars, then any new effort will fail in the same way it did last time
I find it somewhat sanctimonious for the traditional news media to be calling out Facebook for favoring dollars over truth when they themselves were just as key as Facebook was to normalizing and publicizing Trump. CNN executives made a conscious decision to give Trump lots of coverage, in an effort to compete with Fox News. They too presented Trump's views as being just as legitimate and valid as the views of those opposing him.
LOL "Before 2019, it felt like the Facebook communications machine was a well-oiled, unstoppable juggernaut." Umm how about Cambridge Analytica? Facebook's PR has been troubled for a very long time. To suggest that they has a stellar image before 2019 is a joke. I can list many other slip ups where Facebook could have come out and said something (or even better, did something) and then weeks later they come up with a…
Cambridge Analytica is one of FB’s most known debacles but how did the PR team specifically fail?
>Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the…
I think the argument goes like this: 1. The US Presidential election is decided by a small percentage of voters who have an open mind and live in the right districts. 2. Facebook’s targeted advertising allows advertisers to efficiently buy the votes of these select voters. 3. Without Facebook, this wasn’t already happening. Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m…
It was happening, but it was done by people from political parties visiting those voters in person at their doorsteps (I know of it from documentaries), obviously way more expensive and time consuming than ads, and ineffective when done in a foreign accent or language or without other means of identification/verification, so people outside the US had it a lot harder to influence those voters.
This part really struck me: > It feels like finance in 2009. > One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko-ish types reciting Liar’s Poker anecdotes ad nauseam. > Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter remai…
> "too critical"
That wasn't my takeaway. My takeaway was, "Good. Pressure is finally getting through to the masses of complacent co-conspirators who still have enough of a soul to care. Maybe things will finally start changing."
> same standards as networks and not show ads that are provably false I was going to ask you for a reference on this, because I was pretty sure that no such standard existed. I was quite wrong! https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/complaints-about-broadc... "Broadcasters are responsible for selecting the broadcast material that airs on their stations, including advertisements. The FCC expects broadcasters to be respo…
I think that's only for local TV though for the FCC ones, like your ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS affiliates. They have other obligation like providing children programming which is usually early on the weekend, in exchange for the airwaves too. So cable and satellite network stations are treated differently. So like cussing on the local TV stations is a no, no but a show on HBO can cuss all they want. Then also some states lik…
No, online ads do not get an exception with the FTC. The FTC enforces truth-in-advertising laws on ads across all mediums.
Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product). That's why their PR machine is now switching to these slightly astroturfy campaigns. The next step is an advert along the lines of "They call it pollution. We call it…
Oil so useful that modern society would collapse without it.
Facebook is not meeting a core need. It's peddling something entirely optional to society. At best it provides entertainment value, while being extremely addictive and dangerous.
There are a significant number of tech workers I know that do genuinely believe that companies should leverage their technology to benefit the candidates that they feel would be better for the country, and do things like ban Trump's social media accounts. This is what Bosworth was addressing: > But he maintained that the company should not change its policies on political advertising, saying that doing so in order to…
Banning Trump's social media accounts wouldn't require bias against him, it would simply require him to stop receiving special exemption from platform rules.
People are downvoting this, but it's just a matter of fact. Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said that the "newsworthiness" of Trump's tweets outweighs the ordinary standards of propriety that get applied to other people's tweets. Somebody asked Jack point blank whether Twitter would take action if Trump made a tweet explicitly asking his followers to murder a journalist, and Jack's response was, "We'd certainly talk about it." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/would-calli...)