Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad?
Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?
Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?
https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...
This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.
It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.
Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.
But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.
Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.
But I agree, without advertisements, professional sports would not survive, so it's not going to happen.
Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
Fine:
Donate to fight cancer
Not fine:
Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
PP can as well. They can't say "vote pro-choice" but can advertise that they provide women's health services including abortions.
Basically: you can talk about what you do that isn't related to elections or votes in congress.
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.
This is going to be s can of worms.
Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.
Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.
I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I've never heard of this definition of "political ad" - can you provide a link?
Politics don't go away just because you ontologize them as "private sector".
If the thing/person being promoted can be voted on/in, it's a political ad.
that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.