Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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It's technically easy to do. You hire a roomful of people to vet advertising, similar to how every media company did it until 2010 or so. It's financially challenging, but that's the price of admission to the grownup table. That they're hugely profitable right now[1] so I frankly couldn't care less if they had to spend some of that to become legitimately good at what they claim they want to be good at.

I mean, suppose they offered a 100% automated health clinic that misdiagnosed and killed 10% of the patients: "We'd like to hire actual doctors, but that would cost more than we'd wanted to spend, so there's literally nothing we can do to fix this problem. Sorry!" That wouldn't fly. Well, neither does this. Facebook today absolutely sucks at advertising. They're good at the cashing the checks part of the process, but horrendous at the actual implementation.

[1] 27.26% margin, according to https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/profit...

>It's technically easy to do. You hire a roomful of people to vet advertising, similar to how every media company did it until 2010 or so.

But it's not a room full of people. Facebook doesn't only exist in the US and I doubt that people from the US will be good at vetting political ads in Poland.

What's even worse is that at that point you're asking Facebook to censor political ads based on what Facebook thinks is right. Do you really think that Facebook wouldn't be labeled biased and there wouldn't be even further demands from them?

This is easy to do in the example of a health clinic, because there is a right and wrong answer, but in politics that's not the case.

I think it's entirely reasonable that they have at least one review department per market that they want to serve. Again, that's the way the ad business worked until very, very recently. It's not like some onerous idea made up just for them.

You're drawing a false dichotomy about censorship. There's a normal, accepted middle ground between oppressive censorship and anarchy, often referred to as "ad checking" or "editorial review". Right now I can use an automated system to buy an ad saying "Trump Eats Babies" or "Obama Isn't a Citizen" or other flat-out lies. This is wrong. There should be a human in the mix who does at least minimal verification.

Yeah? And if Facebook then blocks all of the "Trump Eats Babies" ads, but lets all of the "Obama Isn't a Citizen" through? Now one party gets to take full advantage of this. If it's done close enough to the election then there's no remedy available for it either. Sure, you might sanction Facebook for it, but the other party already won the election.

Is that really any worse than now, where one party consistently pushes the envelope on this and gets away with it because there's literally zero review? It would take some work to convince me of it.

Proof please that only one party consistently pushes the envelope.

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