I think one of the things that makes it more difficult in the case of facebook is that the ad targeting makes it possible to serve specific ads only to very specific groups.
This means that if the ads say untrue or damaging things, most people will never know, as opposed to newspaper or TV ads. In my mind this argues for at least as strict controls, if not more stringent.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...
TV networks are required to air even untruthful ads as not to run afoul of regulations governing political ads. It's also likely that campaign laws requiring all political ads to be true would be unconstitutional.
Either way, the very fact that the Elizabeth Warren campaign is promoting a fairly blatant falsehood (and many people are happy to parrot a false talking point in the name of truth) is a symptom of the same problem that would force any reasonable entity to make the same decision Facebook just did. Truth isn't very popular, especially in politics and people (on every side of most political issues) would lose their mind if falsehoods were strictly banned.
A whole bunch of comments here are along the lines of: how come Facebook isn't required to abide by the rules that other media companies have to follow? But this is the exact opposite of how things are - small media companies can adopt whatever standards they want, but the broadcast networks have to air even false political advertising, because these types of regulations are more about protecting fairness and free political speech than about the truth. This is an example of Facebook subjecting themselves to the highest possible standards, instead of making arbitrary editorial decisions that smaller actors can get away with.
Again, the point is that the standards followed by broadcast TV are higher than the standards followed by, random media companies that aren't regulated. And what Facebook is doing here aligns closely with how public institutions that are held to the highest standards operate. The general principle regarding the freedom of speech is that the closer you are to being a public institution, the more open you ought to be in terms of the types of speech you accept.
So the criticism here isn't merely wrong, it's exactly backwards.
To me, that opaqueness separating one filter bubble from the next is an important quality. It may raise the effectiveness of propaganda campaigns significantly.
That can't possibly be true. The cornerstone of democracy is informed voters.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that the Trump ad in question does not make claims that are easily proven to be false - they are merely BS claims that are entirely unsubstantiated. I don't think they'd be taken down even if a rule against false claims existed and was properly followed. There's no evidence given for such claims, but not all claims without evidence are false.
Basically Facebook needs to make the whole process maximally transparent, and claim it is just a telephone line, and only people telling the lies are responsible for the lies.
[1] E.g. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
Basically a smart version of a banner ad.
For sure...
"I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country."
They should be targeting eligible voters. If a local election is taking place across the country, then, of course, you shouldn't be seeing the ads.
"There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc"
No, this defeats the purpose. We should be trying to expose people to more viewpoints - not creating more echo-chambers.
Now we can expand on those rules to dictate who can see what, but no matter who views the ad, it would likely be bland, and confer no new viewpoint at all. Lest it fall afoul of FEC rules.
What we're really talking about with FEC rules, is a return to the middle, because extremist views can be shut down by pointing out misleading content in the ads and subsequently rejecting them. Whereas the bland, meaningless stuff will always be free of any misleading content, and be subsequently approved.
I'm not sure what media you consume, but TV and radio ads always seem filled with misleading content about political rivals.
> Surely there are some parameters that would make sense? I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country. There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. A couple factors need to be balanced: the ads need to have the minimum targeting to not be wasteful and pointless, but they can't be so narrowly targeted that oversight by the media and voting public becomes difficult.
I think the right balance is something along the lines of: 1) coarse-grained geo-targeting allowed down to an MSA at the narrowest and 2) no targeting based on interests, demographics, or ideology.
There are some parameters that make sense, for example targetting congressional districts.
What I'm mostly against is zip code, ideology/interest, racial/sexual/etc factors being taken into consideration.
I see this sort of paradoxical mindset all over the place: X breaks the rules but X is just so successful, or so full of potential, so shouldn't we just bend or break the rules for it? But the fact is that X is probably successful or full of potential in large part because it's been breaking the rules, and the rules exist for a reason.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...
From that perspective, Facebook deciding to censor untruthful political ads would be much more akin to ignoring the rules.
It would be easy enough for Facebook to classify ads as political/non-political and for political ads have more scrutiny over what they decide to air. And have strict penalties against those who choose to mis-classify their ads.
Or make political ads visibile publicly for anyone to search for details as to who created them, how much they paid, how many people were targeted.
All these are valid solutions to the problem, but Facebook doesn't want to do it, because if they can get away with what they're doing right now, they can make a ton of ad money.
I doubt it is as easy as you think because not all political ads look like "vote for foo!"
They will evolve to look like governor foo paid company xyz which sells home security products to make an ad about how unsafe the country is...while governor foo runs on a platform all about reducing crime rates...etc
Look at some of the propaganda during the 2016 election era for instance
Isn't that already the case? You can already search all political ads and see who ran them, how much was paid, and the number of people who saw the ad.
And it was dealt with poorly. My whole life, minorities (persons of color esp) have been scapegoated in elections in ads on TV, etc. So, yes, political ad censorship has been dealt with by media, and the "deal" was that victims would be minorities.
In a sense, Facebook just makes it fair. Now anyone can criticize anyone, everyone gets to suffer equally. Those who don't like it should have spoken up decades earlier.
I'm posing anon for obvious reasons. My hope: Lets let Facebook win this round, so we as a society come up with decency rules that help all of us, rather than just defending protected groups.
Do you have any sources for this?
What if you said this? What happens when Bernie Sanders run a dozen ads saying the “rich” haven’t been “paying their fair share” and what standard would allow this to be consider truthful, or will the ad need to define words like rich and fair (good luck on that 2nd one)?