Facebook should ban campaign ads | Hacker News Reader

Facebook should ban campaign ads

techcrunch.com

51 pointslegendarygeek15 comments

The fact that a candidate can tell obvious, blatant, and easy fact-checked lies with impunity isn't Facebook's problem, it's America's problem. (And the rest of the world's too.) In any functional democracy, a candidate telling blatant lies under their own name should be political suicide. It somehow is not, and that's stupid, but I'm not sure banning campaign ads is the right solution.

Banning political ads not directly paid for by a campaign that had to put a candidate's name behind their words seems reasonable. But banning ads from the actual campaigns themselves seems like an overreach.

That's true with TV ads. You can't tell a huge whopper in a TV ad without lots of people seeing it and saying "WTF? I can't vote for this guy."

You can, however, promulgate specific conspiracy theories in highly targeted ads that the majority of people never see. If 0.1% of people believe some crazy theory, you can show them ads linking the opposing candidate with it.

Perhaps almost everyone believes some crazy theory.

In the future, everyone will be fooled for 15 minutes.

You can thank Facebook and their wonderful innovations: algorithmic news feed and social graph.

Couldn’t agree more. The people make up the democracy and they are (for a lack of better word in this instance) stupid and not demanding for a change (of laws, legislature and the people representing them). While banning ads is a solution it’s like treating the symptom and not the root cause - educating masses and giving them a way to practice. active citizenry which is the foundation of democracy. It’s it’s way to hard if not down right impossible to be and active citizen. The system has evolved such that the masses have no time. Capitalistic system promotes a lot of good thing but the downside it’s the masses participating in it mostly have no time for anything other that working. Even for them to go vote is so hard. Even if they make it there it’s hard to understand the ballot and who or what they are voting for. Once they have voted there are basically done till the next voting cycle 2 years out. There is no way for them to keep tabs on progress, voice against things they object or keep their politicians in check. They best solution today is to “call you representative”. Even if you do what do you tell them? It’s all quite like a spaghetti which is quite hard to untangle.

Traditional media should ban compaign ads too. They have been lying for a century.

Totally agree but traditional media was never as ubiquitous as internet based media companies. Their pervasiveness is just at completely diff level. Hence the effects are much more impactful compared to traditional media.

I agree with the mallorean below. Lobbying should be eliminated. It’s just a legal way to bribe and it has corroded the democratic system.

Don't forget Hollywood. They're notoriously political, and almost entirely one-sided.

It gets tiring, trying to find somewhat impartial sources of news. The best I've found is 'Real Clear Politics'. They carry blatantly biased articles, but from both sides of the aisle.

The article makes a reasonable argument that the US would benefit if Facebook were to unilaterally refuse to run political ads, but unless I missed it, it made no mention of why Facebook as a profit driven company would benefit from refusing to accept money from political campaigns. This would seem to be a glaring omission, because unless Facebook stands to benefit, it seems unlikely that Facebook would voluntarily make such a change.

So: how can we better align the incentives of the social media companies with the goals of the public as a whole?

As the article said the TAM for political ads is only a few hundred million dollars. That's not worth the increased scrutiny.

They should go one step further and shut the whole site down

Why's that?

Why not?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...

This post was just on the front page of HN. Why did it disappear all of a sudden?

Ban all political advertising everywhere.

publicly finance all campaigns. Every candidate gets the same public funds to run their entire campaign.

ban all lobbying. eliminate the government -> private sector job pipeline.

eliminate the concept of "money is speech" - speech is speech, and that's it.

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