Hacker News Reader

Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Some regulation I'd like to see for social network ads, at least for political ads:

- Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people.

- Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from across the ideological divide and news orgs.

The point is to give voters some transparency into what a politician is actually campaigning on.

View on HN

How about simply banning targeted advertisement? It's clearly toxic to society.

Whenever someone says "simply do X" or "why not just do X", it indicates they don't understand the implications. If it was simple, they would have already done it. In this case, you want to ban billboards because they target drivers, and radio ads on the oldies station because they target old people, and TV ads because they target the demographic watching whatever show.

Remember when Google was proud of how its ads were targeted so you'd see actual useful things instead of endless shoes and cars? Internet ads really are much better now than in the late 90's.

Facebook would cease to exist.

I love it! Where do I sign the petition?

I like showing the targeting demographics if it forced you to see the words that the advertiser used to find you. Part of the frustration with targetted ads is when you disagree with the targetting, when the algorithm thinks you're part of a group you don't want to be associated with.

An 'I'm not in this group' button would be powerful feedback mechanism.

I think Facebook may already have done the first one. That's probably not going to stop someone like Trump, though; his campaign staff mainly seem to see clever targetting techniques in terms of cost optimisation, as a way of not wasting money on showing people messages that are less likely to convince them. If people want to spread the other ads for free, that just saves them some money. It's not even clear that sleazy tricks with microtargeting are actually a winning strategy; people really don't like finding out they're being tricked and social media is pretty optimized for spreading that kind of discovery.

In addition to making all ads, along with their targeting criteria, bought by any one actor, we'd need something more still. The second level.

For all political ads, why not aggregate and publish the demographic's preferences too? "People who liked this ad also liked $these_things." That way you could see what kinds or subgroups the ads are trying to engage.

I'd like to see which country the ad / news post / video is coming from. Stick a little flag icon on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com