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Comment by jabagonuts | Hacker News Reader

> VICE News did not buy any Facebook ads as part of the test; rather, we received approval to include "Paid for by" disclosures for potential ads.

Playing devil’s advocate here, but maybe Facebook doesn’t waste time on people who don’t actually buy ads? Would be a much more compelling argument if the were actually able to purchase and run ads, and would be curious to see if the actual act of payment triggered a real review from Facebook.

This kind of feels like me as a software developer saying my code works in production! Disclaimer: I never actually deployed it, I only got approval to deploy it.

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The fact that the Zuckerberg ad was rejected seems to indicate that they really were being put through a vetting process. It's possible they are vetted again after payment is received but that seems unlikely.

No it only proves they reject ads from the founder of the company. That’s the only proof you can establish based on the facts. There is no evidence they are vetting anything, and in fact it’s more likely they just filter out zuck.* than the implication that a larger system is at work (Occams razor).

Hahaha my god dude. First, he said it seems to indicate, not prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Second, you think it’s more likely that they filter every single request specifically for Zuckerberg, but do all of the other filtering later on in the pipeline? It’s much more likely that all the filtering happens at the one time, especially at a place like Facebook where most engineers seem to focus on optimising something for performance gains.

Occam’s Razor - it’s knocking on your door, asking to not be quoted when you’re not actually using it.

"but do all of the other filtering later on in the pipeline?"

I believe the parent comment was claiming there is no general filter and/or vetting for others - only for Zuck.

"An attempt to place an ad posing as Hillary Clinton was denied."

Agreed. This investigation was incomplete without actually running an ad. Just because Ninja Turtle's PAC was approved to use the "Paid for by" byline doesn't mean they could actually get their ad all the way through Facebook's approval process

Maybe Vice didn't do it because it would expose them to criminal impersonation charges? And maybe that's also why Facebook feels their current process is good enough.

It seems they did buy ads attributed to Mike Pence and ISIS previously (linked to from this article):

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/wj9mny/facebooks-politic...

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