Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes

theguardian.com

128 pointsmozumder25 comments

This is basically the same situation all 'platforms' and 'social media sites' are stuck in now. On the one hand, they want to be allowed to censor content to please advertisers and make things 'palatable' to the mainstream, yet at the same time they want the legal immunities granted to a common carrier like an electricity company or telephone company.

Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Medium, Instagram and various others are all in the exact same situation. Hopefully at one point they'll be made to take a real stance and either admit they're a publisher or stay neutral on content.

This is an issue as it relates to it's editorial decisions on controversial political issues.

Does Facebook allowing white-nationalist content mean it's endorsing it as an editorial decision?

If any other publication published content that endorses white nationalism, they'd be shunned by the advertising world. Can't imagine Proctor & Gamble or Chevrolet as willing to place their ads next to white-nationalist content in Facebook.

Facebook wants the best of both worlds and I bet that the Government will let them...

Do any people actually associate the ads they see with the content next to them on any platforms hosting user generated content? (Or any platform whatsoever)

Like, I might if the ad is relevant to the piece of content in question. For example if I am watching construction/woodworking/industrial videos on youtube I won't be surprised if I see ads relating to tools, but thats about it.

I'm not gonna go ahead and buy this tool specifically because the ad is on a video I enjoyed, or associate another company with evil just because it's on a bad video.

Another guess would be it's simply the subconcious thing of seeing an ad to something potentially bad?

> Do any people actually associate the ads they see with the content next to them on any platforms hosting user generated content? (Or any platform whatsoever)

Yes. This is how branding works. It's why companies pay for a famous celebrity to represent their brand, instead of a random person, because you associate a higher quality with a famous celebrity.

The major brands have very specific rules on what their ads can appear next to.. they actually write down things like "our ad can't appear next to blood/violence" etc..

Doesn't matter if it's user-generated or not. As long as that image exists next to the brand, the brand is fucked. I mean, what would you think of Chanel if they ever placed their beautiful ad next to a picture of a dead body?

>because you associate a higher quality with a famous celebrity.

I don't think people are buying because of perceived quality. They buy because celebrities are trend setters. A celebrity using something makes it a kind of status symbol.

But the question remains, does an ad being shown next to something objectionable transfer some of that negative sentiment to the brand? Even when people know the placement is algorithmic/automatic? I don't think speculation will answer this question.

When a celebrity buys something, it is perceived as higher quality, since a low quality product would damage that celebrity's brand. Celebrities also have filters for bad branding, too.

This isn't new a new field of research. This is literally and exactly how branding works.

If you feel a century of advertising science is unproven, feel free to show your own research that goes against the experiences of millions of people in the field.

Would be interesting to see those studies. But at the same time, consumers are much more sophisticated these days and so those studies would need to be repeated with a modern audience. For example, no one believes LeBron James wears Nike because they're the best, they know he's being paid $1 billion to wear them.

That's just factually incorrect. Celebrity endorsements are actually more powerful now than in the past, I'm assuming because youtube style celebrity makes it seem more like the persona the celebrity presents is an actual person, or just more exposure though those explanations are just my handwave. https://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/apac/docs/...

Someone's random article from a non-ranked journal, but looks like it's got some decent reference papers http://www.jimsjournal.org/13%20Yi%20Ching%20Tsai.pdf

I agree that celebrity endorsements are effective. The question is why are they effective. I disagreed that celebrity endorsements influence perceived quality. This is different than perceived value which includes many factors, one of which is perceived quality.

A google search provides very little studies that address endorser on perceived quality of the product. The couple I found provided mixed results, with questionable applicability to western audiences (E.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2814907).

Those who are asserting that its obviously true that endorser influences perceived quality apparently do not have the literature behind them.

I think you're (unintentionally) equivocating on value vs quality. The grandparent comment used "quality" in the colloquial sense for value as best I read it. I doubt that anyone running a company thinks that having thier name next to gory images makes people think the skill of the shoe stitching (quality in your meaning?) is worse, but that it reduces the alignment of the pnumbra between the company and the individual reducing the value of company's brand / ability to sell products to the consumer.

That's a plausible reading of the disagreement

> consumers are much more sophisticated these days

Do you have something to back that up? Curious if this is true, or just your perception.

For example, no one believes LeBron James wears Nike because they're the best, they know he's being paid $1 billion to wear them.

Consider the possibility that all basketball shoes are substantially identical, and that Nike is paying LeBron $1B simply to differentiate theirs.

(edited and fixed after accidental early posting. edit2: added URLs)

> does an ad being shown next to something objectionable transfer some of that negative sentiment to the brand?

Yes, it does because the negative sentiment will be added to the possible results returned by "System 1"[1][2] thinking that tends to be very fast at approximate searches of long term memory and applying energy saving simplifications/heuristics. System 1 strongly favors fast lookup times over accuracy; this is very useful when you need to decide quickly if that thing you just saw around the corner was a bear or just a strangely shaped shrubbery. Wasting a bit of energy running away from shrubbery is a better survival strategy than waiting for an accurate analysis from System 2 while the bear eats you.

The question isn't if the brand will be negatively affected - it will. What we don't know is how this is the size of the effect, which probably varies wildly due to many different factors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM

This is fairly well settled science. If you have conflicting data then by all means, share, but you can't just write off decades of _real_ work in the field based upon your own musings and expect to be taken seriously.

I'm not sure what decades of research you're referring to, but after my own search the literature seems suspiciously sparse on the effects of endorser to perceived quality of the product. I agree that celebrity endorsements are effective generally, just not for this reason. I would be interested in seeing some of these studies you're referring to.

So, when advertising agencies run A/B tests, they don't publish the result in scientific journals. They just use the data internally along with art direction and relationship/political factors to make advertising decisions.

This isn't an open source field with a handy guide. This is a 'knowledge through experience' field. You learn from those people, not through academic research or Google search.

In fact, a good advertiser can instantly find holes in published research based on the many variables that a paper doesn't take into account, but an advertiser is already familiar with. "Brand value correlates with celebrity status... but inversely with the celebrity nationality.. with a correlation with the accent.. but also with season of the year.. except when using this font... and based on president's party" etc.. All these variables may have a nonlinear relationship.

To get a good introduction to what you're dealing with, just watch "Mad Men".

Pairing up advertising to content is pretty standard since forever. Even soap operas got their name because they were sponsored by dish soap makers, who marketed to housewives, i.e. the people who were home during the day to watch soap operas.

> Do any people actually associate the ads they see with the content next to them on any platforms hosting user generated content?

I doubt it, but it's complicated. Advertisers think that people do. People know that advertisers think that they do, so they use that to their advantage. If they disagree with something, they know there's nothing they can do... but... they can feign outrage ("I'm boycotting Crest toothpaste because they support X") and since advertisers think they're being genuine, they act. Thus, even though they know the advertisement has nothing to do with the social networking user they dislike, they can have action taken against the person they don't like.

No advertiser is bold enough to say "I think you're lying," and thus, the problem persists. Advertisers get to be the ad-hoc censors of the platforms they advertise on.

Maybe you won't buy a tool just because you saw an ad, but later when you need to buy a tool like it, the ad you saw might have established the brand being asvertised as an option. When it pops up in your head, having seen it in a negative context might affect your decision regardless of the relationship between the advertiser and its context.

I'd guess people would buy more stuff in general if for example TV ads were all aired in the middle of upbeat shows.

In my opinion this became a problem when Facebook/Twitter/Youtube decided to try to create a "top stories" type of algorithmic content selection, in an attempt to try to increase engagement. What happens when they put that white nationalist content in the top stories, because their uncontrolled algorithms have decided you might be interested in that type of content?

In my opinion it should go back to the old days of chronological content from only the entities I've decided to listen to. (I.E. followed/friends/subscribed.) That way, if the WN want to push their mess, they can, and I'll never be exposed to it because I'm not at all interested in following someone who would ever share that.

If I'm researching a topic about them, then I can search using a standard searching algorithm, and find the relevant content.

Maybe a naive point of view in today's age, but that's what I think is simplest. It also just happens to be how it used to be.

Dumb question: is this a semantics issue?

to the general public “publisher”=“something like the NYT” vs legally where it probably means “making stuff publicly available”?

From what I understand, if you're a publisher you can censor or restrict content according to your own rules. Very different from a common carrier, where you can't restrict content and in doing so gain immunity for the content.

It seems Facebook Et Al want the best of both worlds

Don’t get me wrong: FB is clearly out to screw everyone other than themselves: governments, tax boards, their users (selling their details to anyone with money), the peoplepaying for user info (by selling them fake user data).

This was just a “i’m Not sure if in many of these cases it’s a confusion over general vs legal definitions” :D

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