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Comment by superplussed | Hacker News Reader

On the subject of increasing transparency, Jason Calacanis had a suggestion that I thought was brilliant. There should be a public database of all ads running on Facebook, that would simply show the ad, the ad purchaser, and who the ad is targeted to.

There ads would be filterable, so that someone viewing the database could filter based on the same criteria that Facebook allows advertisers to target. So if I search "non-college educated white males over the age of 40 in Midwestern suburbia", I get a complete overview of what these people have been shown. If I come across a nefarious advertiser, I can also filter to see what other campaigns they've run and who they've targeted.

Transparency, solved. Now the responsibility to police the ads becomes somewhat shared and it's easy to imagine watchdog groups monitoring different types of campaigns looking for bad actors.

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That's a great idea but "tooth and nail" doesn't even begin to describe how hard Facebook will fight against that kind of transparency.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Facebook (and other social networks) are not a net-positive thing for society as a whole, the way they currently are. So I wonder how much we should care about their opinion, other than understanding the power they can bring in fighting change.

I think Facebook does not want to be evil, if the rules are the same for their competitors too they might be convinced to implement deep changes like this one.

The alternative, which they will really not want, is that they are ultimately made liable for the defamation, paid disinformation campaigns and other forms of injustice they facilitate, in every jurisdiction where they operate.

That could become a terrible disadvantage for Facebook and could be weaponized by competitors - unless it is mandatory for all companies publishing ads online (and maybe offline?).

I don't think it is necessarily true that consumers would prefer a social network with non-transparent ads over a social network with transparent ad funding. Making ads transparent might even help facebook's bottom line by building more trust with its users.

Yeah for it to work it would have to be a regulation for all companies that allowed targeted advertising and reach a certain scale.

> ... and who the ad is targeted to.

Well, first thing I think is how to convince the host of those ads to make this kind of information public.

I mean, if I knew that ad is targeting me, I will probably be more cation towards it and thus reduce it's effectiveness. I don't think Facebook or anyone in the business want that to happen.

So, in order to implement that kind of transparency, you need law and government to enforce them across all online ad services, rather than depends on self-discipline of some certain company.

However, that may come with their own problem, for example, it will increase government's control on online content displaying.

Truly a hard problem isn't?

It definitely is a hard problem, and I agree that there's no way that this could happen without regulation. I could imagine it being enforced across all companies that reach a certain scale. Below some scale threshhold the damage that can be done through bad actors is minimal anyway, at scale, it can alter elections.

I think another side-effect here is that it could turn the act of buying advertising into an arms race, where those buying advertising are forced to monitor their competitor's advertising buys since they know that their competitors are doing it to them.

Internet Archive collects political ads: https://archive.org/details/political_ads but of course not targeting, that would probably be campaign's trade secret which they would be very reluctant to disclose, and probably would shun advertiser that does not preserve their trade secrets.

I’d say that by the time you find something in that database, the damage is already done. After the ”ad” is shown, it won’t be enough removing the ad or post a ”correction article” to make someone forget what they saw or heard; especially not if the message is in line with their current beliefs. That’s what makes this scary.

Facebook is only interested in users being transparent, not themselves.

Interesting. Have you got an 'official' link for Calacanis' proposal?

He mentioned it during one of his podcasts, and unfortunately I listen to all of them so I'd have no idea which one he mentioned it in.

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