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Comment by tarjei | Hacker News Reader

As much as I fear the China with regard to censorship, I think this could be a wise move for all social media platforms.

There are two reason why I think this:

a) Political advertising on social media is very hard to police as you can create huge amount of versions of each ad and target very different audiences.

b) Political advertising at volume favors the richest campaigns with the largest amount of knowledge about their targets.

By blanket removing political advertising from these platforms more focus would have to be made for more traditional forms of political work (door to door etc) and thus a slower more deliberate political climate.

It is by no means panacea but a good start.

Norway has always forbiden political TV-advertising, something that I think has helped the debate stay a bit less polarized, though that has changed with the advent of Facebook and it's ilk.

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This isn't about political ads, it's about silencing any politics on the platform.

There are over 80 million US downloads of TikTok as of October 2018, with an active user count of 40 million [1]. This means China's authoritarian regime is influencing the political discussion of 40m+ US citizens.

You say this ban is good, I disagree. In the US, a lack of informed political discussion is one major factor keeping young voters away from the polls. It also prevents global free speech from reaching 400 million Chinese users.

1. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/

> a lack of informed political discussion

Was TikTok was an appropriate place for informed political discussion?

The forum is the right place for political discussion, regardless of what the forum is. As for the political discussion being "informed", that is subjective.

What are you using the definite article to mean there?

But isn't TikTok specifically talking about paid ads in this article?

Our parent wrote that paid political advertising is favoring those with the greatest amount of money to spend and therefore (as far as I understood) reducing the quality of political conversation. (Which sounds plausible to me, since money is a factor largely unrelated to quality.)

You seem to imply that paid political advertising is increasing the quality of the discourse. Is that right? If yes, I'd love to know why!

> In the US, a lack of informed political discussion is one major factor keeping young voters away from the polls.

I agree.

But the purpose of political advertising is to misinform.

This isn't about political ads, it's about silencing any politics on the platform.

That's not true at all, at least not on the surface. Do you have any proof of anyone being banned as a user for posting political content?

From the article: “Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” says Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook.

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group or issue at the federal, state or local level — including election-related ads, advocacy ads or issue ads,” he says.

How is political defined? What happens in the US is that if certain financing is unavailable to be used in a certain way, like direct support of a candidate or party, then that money is shifted into “issue advertising” which presents a topic of political disagreement to favor one side over another. Within the information domain of a political debate, there may be human activities that are non-political but political organizations disguise themselves within, for example, adoption services in the abortion debate. Many messages, such as car advertising have an implicit political message that public funding of roads is positive and liberating. Maybe Norway has the line between political and everything else figured out or maybe there is a cultural definition that makes it easier, but banning political advertising seems very difficult.

Seems simple enough to me: if it's funded by a political party or candidate, it's a political advertisement, regardless of the content. There are always ways of illegally hiding candidates' expenses, but most of the time it should be obvious who funded an ad opposing or promoting a politician.

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