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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of:

If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down?

I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust. As a result, no matter how easy or difficult truth is to find, without trust no one will believe the truth even if they hear it clearly.

I find political speech pervasive, and believe that almost everything a person says or does has some political element. Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.

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> I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech.

I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify.

First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don't mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult.

Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in the press? Do we need to go lookup in Lexis-Nexis every statement the candidate has made about the Green New Deal?

Even if we limit it to actual votes, it's still problematic. Did the candidate vote for the markup in committee? Did they vote to move it to the floor? In the Senate, did they vote for cloture, but vote against it on the floor? Did they vote for the bill out of conference?

Some might recall, we spent a good portion of the 2004 campaign arguing over whether John Kerry voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.

This stuff is extremely subjective. It's probably something like a day's work for a seasoned reporter to accurately fact check a claim like this, and even then it's open to interpretation, which is easy enough to express in a fact check, but pretty hard in a binary judgement of truth.

"binary judgement of truth"

I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.

Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.

There is a danger in deferring a "truth" assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.

>comfortable with non-binary truth

Careful, getting a bit too postmodernists in here. If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.

>And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.

And how many politicians on both sides of the aisle double-down on an issue just to remain consistent to their base? Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbying or the promise of a high-up position once they're out of office?

>And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.

Maybe the Stoics were on to something. If the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth?

> If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.

Isn't the point of seeing the truth as non-binary that they cannot become false? Just less likely to be true?

This seems intrinsically more amenable to changing one's mind on the truth of something, though I agree that not having an opinion on the truth of something is apathetic. Just because you strongly believe that you're about 60% sure that something is true doesn't make it less strongly held.

I do this all the time in scientific analysis... estimating how likely I am to be correct is part of the job.

I think what they mean by truths becoming false is rather that all certainties become uncertainties. Delving too deep in postmodernism is like taking all of your legos and melting them.

If I want to have a conversation about free speech, and a postmodernist begins questioning if we even actually have free will, or if it's even valid to discuss morality if it's entirely possible we exist in a simulation...you haven't actually advanced anything. You've just made soup. Postmodernism is a tool for turning building blocks into soup, and that is more often than not extremely counterproductive. Though it is, to some degree, necessary.

I think the fundamental problem is that aggressive postmodernism will often disregard presuppositions with absolutely no interest in understanding the utility/value of the presupposition.

I would turn that around and say antipostmodernists are upset that they can't have their presuppositions without justifying their utility/value first.

I think postmodernism leads straight to linguistics, not apathy. Much of politics is based around words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “the middle class”, “big government”. There is no truth around these things because they mean whatever is politically convenient in the moment. I mean sure you can define a pretty good general purpose term for your own use, but that’s not going to be how politicians use it. These should be seen as rhetorical terms, not inherently meaningful outside of the context of, say, a speech or and ongoing public discussion. It is far easier and cheaper to redefine yourself out of commitments than it is to actually stand for concrete values. The fix is to stand for concrete values that everyone can easily identify and discuss in concrete terms. It should be easy, then, to determine the difference between “waffling” and adjusting to a new situation because everyone can adjust together around a value consensus.

Note, PR takes literally the exact opposite tact to communication. We’re barreling deep into a post-truth world with an incredible amount of money fueling this. See also: non linear warfare, hypernormalization, Edward Bernays, why to buy a newspaper when it never makes money.

"If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually"

My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.

"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."

Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.

"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"

I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.

> And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative

Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.

Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?

People in your example are not “neutral” in the first place.

Did the Christians try to convince the agnostic about something? If not, nothing changes before or after they leave.

Anyway, the OP was about political ads that can affect how people vote, a decision to vote or not affects the community. Being agnostic about something (aliens) does not necessarily have the same gravity of effect as believing in a political ad.

If the Christians are bullying the athiests, and the agnostic does nothing, then yes, they are implicitly supporting the actions taking place in their vicinity. If they're just all sitting around doing nothing, the implicit support is of them sitting around doing nothing.

Every moment you're not actively working for the FBI homicide department, you're commiting implicit murders.

Yes, people are fine with all sorts of murders and other atrocities taking place, as long as its not happening to them. As long as the right kind of people suffer. Your phrasing is wrong, of course, because you're conflating support for something with committing the act yourself, but you're not too far off the mark.

If you are present for a murder and you do nothing to either prevent it or report it, then yes, you are complicit in the murder.

This is an extremely bad example for two reasons:

- one: you are bringing religion into a discussion where it isn't necessary

- two: it hangs in a frame where a causual passer-by might think this is usual. I mean: if I write "if the rabbits chases the cats and the dogs do nothing" an hypothetical reader who knows nothing about cats and rabbits might easily get the idea that this is a common occurrence, while in fact it is fact a very unusual one.

- one: not my example; it was introduced by someone as a rhetorical jab by trying to introduce an emotionally-charged subject. The point doesn't depend on religion in any particular way, and I'm happy to rephrase it.

- two: I think this is fine. In an example where a bunch of people are sitting in a bar and a big group starts bullying a smaller group, someone who does nothing is allowing this to happen, and we can attribute moral responsibility for them allowing this to happen. Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay. If someone doesn't know or understand that bullying is wrong, assigning moral responsibility is more complicated, but neither of those things depend on their knowledge of the frequency of bullying. There is a way in which available information is important, but not this one.

> Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay.

Hmmmm. I think you managed to sneak in another subtle error:

If that was your idea then, at least in an Internet context, you should probably write about how Atheists are bullying Christians.

I'd avoid this example at all. It feels contrived and either you intended it or not it smears a good number of innocent people.

Use something neutral instead:

Group a and group b or something.

> Group a and group b or something.

I referred to the groups as "The Larger Group" and "The Smaller Group." I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Ok, let me spell it out then:

Writing - especially in an Internet forum context - about Christians bullying Atheists

is about as fitting as

- in a historic context - writing an example about Jews killing Nazis. Yes, it has happened, more than once. And no, for some reason that doesn't make it a good example except when we are discussing that particular topic.

Besides, as was mentioned above you are both pulling an unrelated group of people into this and you are pulling religion into an argument about something else.

Snide remarks like that is equally annoying regardless of if they come from you or from the old relative who always wants to frame everything good that happens as a miracle from $DEITY

Both you and the old relative might mean it well and get som points from people who agree with you but on the larger scale it only increases tension.

I rephrased in terms of unnamed groups, what are you still going on about? You should direct these comments at the person who chose to make it about religion.

(Hey philipov, I'm kinda using this comment to reply to both of you -- not everything here is directed at you.)

Guy Who Chose To Make It About Religion, over here! FWIW I was just looking for a concrete example that would illustrate the preposterous nature of the statement I was replying to, and when I searched my brain for people who don't have a position on something "agnostic" was the one that immediately came to mind. Having the hindsight of seeing this little back and forth between you two, maybe "undecided voter" would have been more apropos... but I feel like that could have potentially spiraled out, too. In any event, I wasn't trying to start a holy flame war and I didn't imagine that anybody would go on a tangent about the religious aspect of it.

That said, why not stoke these flames unnecessarily? As for whether athiests gang up on Christians more than the other way around, I don't think the "internet" context is relevant; the internet is the context we're discussing this in, but the hypothetical bar was IRL (or at least, that was the interpretation of the author and the author has never heard of a bar that isn't IRL). Where I live (Midwest US) Christians ganging up on athiests seems more common than the other way around IRL, so if we need to unpack the realism of philipov's modification to my example and willfully ignore the fact that their choice of which group would be cast as the aggressor was just based on which group was initially larger in my example (which was in turn based on which group is larger IRL, but I don't feel the example would be substantially different if labels were reversed) I'll vote for "marginally more realistic than the other way around and nowhere near the same ballpark as a roles-reversed holocaust."

Edit: s/the holocaust/a roles-reversed holocaust/

Good explanation. My original point was that the attempt to reduce to absurdity fails because it's not simply being something or holding some opinion that causes others to be in implicit support of it. Implicit support consists in being present when an immoral or unethical action takes place, and not stopping it when you have the opportunity to do so. Indeed, it doesn't even require one group to be in the majority, although fear of going against a larger group is often what causes people to stay silent.

I get your point, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to my original post because the comment I was replying to was making statements about the truth of descriptive claims rather than, say, standing by while group X oppresses group Y. Of course these are intertwined and hard to separate in some cases; you can find plenty of examples where descriptive claims have been used to justify horrible atrocities, and being agnostic towards the claims Nazis made about Jews would not garner my sympathies, but I hope you can understand the distinction I'm drawing. I don't even feel comfortable saying that the scared or indifferent onlooker would be supporting group X (though if they pay taxes to group X I'd say they are supporting the oppression whether or not they speak up, in a financial sense), but I do understand your reasoning in that context and don't particularly care to split hairs over the definition of "support" (it doesn't affect my opinions of standing by and doing nothing in the face of oppression, I'm just a pedantic motherfucker).

Religion is absolutely part of the negotiation of power (politics). It is, after all, still 2019, but I think this will be so even in Dune.

The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.

In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.

We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.

I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.

> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.

For a general view:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Probabilistic_logic

Bayesian side:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/A_priori_probability

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bayesian_inference (Bayesian Updating)

No, there are formal systems for handling uncertainty, Bayesian inference, fuzzy logic etc. Even informally we do apply similar rules all the time (though we are not free of biases)

> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument.

To me, this seems like less a problem with degrees of truth, and more a problem with faith in simplistic arguments.

Degrees of truth aren't some option you can choose, it's just an observation about how the world already works, where information is universally not perfect. The point is by acknowledging it, you will be more willing to update bad information and bad conclusions as you get updated information.

1) Get sympathetic media to print a claim

2) Plaster claim over grainy black-and-white photo, with attribution. Run TV/internet campaign with it.

If you're having a lawyerly debate about the technicalities of the accusation, you've already lost.

“X supports the Green New Deal” is indeed highly subjective for some values of X. But that doesn’t include most Republicans, who have been consistently against the whole thing from start to finish.

I think the parent's point is that the variable is for some values of "Green New Deal".

It's like how Republicans (tend to) oppose "socialized health care" but support Medicare. A lot of politics is just playing with words, and "Green New Deal" offers plenty of ambiguity.

Given many republicans do not agree that climate change is caused by humans, I don't see the substance of your point.

For example, say that the Green New Deal is a specific bill in a House committee. For some political reason (maybe the Democrats aren’t ready to vote on it yet), the Republican chair of the committee, Representative X, votes in favor of it. Thus an ad saying “Representative X voted in favor of the Green New Deal” is factually accurate while an ad saying “Representative X supports the Green New Deal” is debatably true.

But if it wasn't called the Green New Deal, would those same Republicans oppose constituent parts?

Okay, you can point out one extreme side of the continuum. What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?

> I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust.

This is true, of course, but why is this such a serious or novel concern? All criminal trials, for instance, require making a judgement on the truth about reality. Of course some cases are very hard, and sometimes we get the wrong outcome. But what else do you suggest? That no one ever attempt to determine anything about reality?

The cream should eventually rise to the top. Political ads are now archived for anyone to scrutinize. If a politician kept releasing ridiculous ads, voters and the general public would likely know about the existence at least. Censoring ads opens up a much larger can of worms IMO. "Republicans back the green deal" could mean:

a. Congressional Republican majority b. Some elected Republicans c. A group of Republican voters

If AOC ran that ad, it very well would be truthful for B and C, but should Facebook interpret the ad as describing A? There's way too much nuance to be the single arbitrator.

You mention that political ads are archived for anyone to scrutinize. I am not aware of this and my belief is that this is both not the case, and in fact very difficult to execute due to the ephemeral nature of internet advertising.

For example, imagine my TIMECUBE PAC ponies up for 2500 targeted facebook micro-campaigns with very slight variations depending on the target demo with an ad spend of $20, $50K cost. Would it be actually possible for anybody to get Facebook to tell them who I was advertising at, or what those ads were?

Do you mean something like this? It doesn't go into exact details, but it does exist... https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

Yes, exactly. This is at least granular enough to see location, gender, type of message, etc. previously with TV or old media, we couldn’t access who politicians were targeting with ads. Now we can. I don’t see how this isn’t an improvement?

Wow no!

TV ads are broadcast and you can have one grad student check some boxes per market, they just need an extension cord and a bunch of TVs to watch.

Internet ads can have a spend of one and they're gone, or behind this really slick infinite scroll. If 40 people see the ad really whats the likelihood of gleaning useful information?

The Old World Mad Men style Ad is blasted from the antenna, printed, or plastered on a billboard. With Old Media you can tell easily who's being targeted because you can't narrow down based on "Likely to be Pregnant". A TV commercial is incapable of pranking your roommate[0], this stuff is a wholly new category, and its profitability is larger than Uber's 2019 Q2 posted losses.

While this handy search page is for sure an improvement over Facebook's previously completely opaque ad market, I disagree that this is an improvement over the Old Media.

I'd also imagine the Old Media ads have a lawyer or compliance person overseeing the business, and while I know FB has the lawyers I doubt anyone is motivated or empowered to hit the brakes.

[0] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...

You can still target ads based on the type of show, time of day, and billboard location. I still don't believe you could have grad students look at every political ad, especially across all local elections. While the content of the ad does not change much for TV, you still won't know exactly how much a politician was paying for each ad slot, and what demographic the politician was trying to target.

Yes indeed, this is all true except the last phrase. You can quickly infer which demo the ad was made for my observing the location, time, or tv show.

Just look at the content surrounding the ads on daytime soaps, college ball, anime cartoons. Billboard next to (My apologies for this shorthand, I can't think of any polite way to make this next analogy) "Inner City" liquor store, suburban daycare, or just along the interstate.

As well as dead reckoning, I'll bet a local library has the spend on paper in some industry publication. Anyone in the industry can probably rattle off the spend and get pretty close. Plus, since they are marketing ad space for money, why not send over a proposal and see what the initial offer is?

Surely this takes more time than glancing at some Facebook reactjs ad timeline which is for sure not edited by an algorithm, but like I said there is a finite amount of billboards and tv channels. One grad student wouldn't do it, but however many you need for the internet is sure going to cost you.

Cable subs are going one direction, so it’s probably better to think about the other alternative mediums. These would be streaming services like Hulu, YouTube, Roku, digital billboards, and digital ad impressions through ad exchanges. All of these will offer significant ways to personalize and customize ads for viewers and have no audit system presently. I don’t see how Facebook removing political advertising remotely solves the problem going forward.

Well thats certainly something to dig into. Thank you.

However, this search box doesn't adequately explain who is seeing these ads. It does expose which state the ads are shown within, and the general demo (age, gender), but if I am not mistaken the ad targeting service is way more fine grained than this. Isn't this stuff down to the zip+4 or even, "near a Starbucks"? Facebook faced a lawsuit[0] in 2019 for Fair Housing Act violations, the complaint alleges that facebook let people advertise housing while excluding "Hispanic", "New Parents", etc in the target demographics.

It also looks like I can search back 7, 60, 30, 90 days or "All Impressions". There's no way a librarian had any input in this.

In addition, I suspect that if I were to actually do analysis here Facebook would start demanding PII, especially if I start crawling the searches. Is there an API for this? The infinite scrolling is IMO useless for any real use cases such as monitoring political ads in general.

It does appears as if I could use this search box to find one ad campaign or all of one org's campaigns. But I kind of suspect I'd need a whole bunch of grad students to do data collection?

Do you know if other platforms also expose some political ads?

[0] https://www.salon.com/2019/08/21/digital-redlining-facebooks...

There's an api here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/?source=archive-lan...

> What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?

Basically an arms race of lies, where those willing to lie the most have the greatest advantage. What's worse is that the most insidious of the lies will appeal to the parts of the targets' psyches that wants very much to believe the lies, and therefore unlikely to proactively fact check (i.e Pizzagate).

And as has been the trend of late, lies that are eventually publicly debunked will be minimized as being "just jokes".

I completely agree with what you're saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."

> one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."

That misses a whole bunch of political advertising. Most of it, I'd wager.

A sympathetic news outlet is often treading on the edge of political advertising as well. Some TV station airing a favorable or unfavorable documentary on a candidate during election season when executives of those stations have publicly supported (or not supported) a candidate or party seems no different than a PAC buying an ad on that same station.

Imagine if we applied this standard to a story of significant presidential malfeasance in October. Something so terrible no one would ever vote for the person. Should we?

You have to start somewhere.

While I agree with you, the most vocal of Twitter users likely won’t. Some will be furious if NRA ads are allowed, and others furious if ACLU ads are allowed. And for some reason those are the people society has decided to listen to.

No. You actually don't have to start somewhere.

Starting somewhere bad without a plan is actively bad.

Here's the thing, people. FB and Twitter are pretty much garbage. That's fine, and we all mostly agree about that.

Here's the worst part of social media in general: it's uniting the absolute shittiest of the Republicans with the absolute shittiest of the Democrats and encouraging them both to get together and form a government agency that defines "truth" and then forces private entities to enforce that truth.

There is literally nothing Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website could do that would be this actually bad.

While I can imagine what you mean by "shittiest Republicans", could you give me examples of the "shittiest Democrats"?

You don't think there are better and worse Democrats?

It's real hard to find a reason to be upset with a blanket ban on political ads on Twitter. You can still say what you want to say, but Twitter isn't going to accept money to help you promote your message. Good for them.

1. No you don't. 2. Regulations can lend credibility so a small ineffective "start" has a cost to it.

Independent political action committees (both PACs and Super PACs) need to report their spending to the FEC, tied to the candidate their independent expenditure is in favor of/support.

That covers most political spending on the national level. Political spending for state offices (which dont have to report to the FEC) is a whole other story.

The difficulty is that we once used propaganda in war time, because we needed it. The problem now is that you don’t know who is doing it, and for what.

And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.

nowadays most of us have no idea what is propaganda and what isn't. heck sometimes you eventually research it and realize stuff you believed was true for decades because you were just told so by some authoritative source (like "TV" or what not really), turn out, is between misleading to flat out wrong. Note that I'm not even thinking about this in terms of politics. It seems to be the case for so many different things, sometimes due to ignorance, sometimes malice.

My favorite example is "eating carrots improves your vision." Came from WW2 propaganda trying to hide the existence of radar.

What I saw was that AOC very effectively got him to admit that they already will do it in certain cases. He admitted that if someone tried to place an ad that contributed to voter suppression (by misreporting the date of the election), that would be banned.

One persons "suppression of speech" is another persons right to not publish and spread that persons bullshit.

This is why people always bring up that the "Free speech" is a concept that applies to governments(never-mind the historical origins in ancient Athens which was largely around protecting political discourse and dissent from prosecution..). Like many restrictions placed on the government it falls apart and becomes contradictory when applied to the individual.

So Facebook should be regulated as a publisher?

If this is intended to make a §230 argument, consider that its reason d'etre is based on the complete impracticality of pre-clearing user generated content.

The practical considerations differ by orders of magnitude when we're talking about paid advertisements.

It's not the suppression of speech. It's the regulation of speech amplification, especially paid amplification.

The concept of fraud and libel are related too. It is fraudulent to claim you are someone that you are not.

Although a popular meme like the platform/publisher duality it isn't a valid concept legally - at least in the US conception. Not any more than being able to get away with specific death threats as "a promise". That sort of "marginal loophole" is frowned upon in the jurisprudence period. The prevailing form of restrictions that have survived are specific and tailored invalidations of forms of speech protection - threats, fraud, and libel.

Not to say that special pleading for abridging rights hasn't embedded itself via ex-nilho doctrines turned precedent.

Many trees constitute a forest. A single tree does not. At some point, a group of trees becomes large enough to be considered a forest. There is no way to provide any non-arbitrary rule where that point is.

Does this render the concept of a "forest" meaningless?

If you promise to chop down all forests but are fine with trees, yes.

Does this follow?

I run a site. I want to get rid of all fraudulent spam but allow legitimate commercial product advertisements. I train a model to tell the difference (or maybe I just make a human judgment call). It is better than guessing but worse than perfect: false positives and false negatives exist and expose me to criticism from interested parties.

Your position is that this renders the concept of spam meaningless because I promised to get rid of spam and allow non-spam content.

If you're tying ribbons to trees in forests but not to other trees, you (or other interested folks) can correct any errors. And, if you actually wanted to be fair, you'd fix your mistakes yourself (or with your own resources) instead of expecting everyone else to clean up after you.

If you have robots chopping down forests, there's not much to do when they're wrong except apologize and explain that algorithms are hard.

This exact topic is covered in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and the answer is that the concept of forest is not defined by such a condition. It is a basket of examples of forests and identifying a new example in the basket is done by means of analogy to the existing examples.

It is therefore possible for a concept to grow to include contradictory examples, at which point people will typically split the basket into two distinct concepts, like a forest vs a grove. The point at which that happens is somewhat arbitrary, but it also doesn't exist a priori. Someone has to try to use the word ambiguously. Words don't have meanings until they are used by people to mean.

It is even possible for a distinction to not be made, and for someone to experience cognitive dissonance when two contradictory examples remain in the same basket.

So is it not better to take the twitter approach here and just say - political advertising = banned?

Take the decision out of what is true / not true out of it and just remove the political advertisements all together.

It's still not easy. Suppose I write a bot that flags all of my competitors ads a political?

At least then Twitter would have a pretty clear incentive to combat your bot as it and its ilk could have a substantial effect on their revenue. No doubt this will happen. You could already be doing this on youtube to flag a competitor's content as copyright infringement.

Well, Google has figured out how to make it really hard to make a link farm that gets your web page to the top of the listings.

Very similar problem. I would expect that they would keep track of who is doing the flagging and whether their flagging is consistent with other flaggers, and various other tests for "naturalness" and lack of bias and so on. Then weight things appropriately.

All advertising is incredibly political, because companies operate in a politicized world.

Under this guidance for example, Shell could advertise all they want on twitter, but running an ad against Shell about how they pollute the environment or contribute to global warming would be banned.

So then your options are to ban all advertising, or be selective in what advertising you allow. Which is inherently a political position.

I am not buying this, in the narrow definition, politics is relevant to politicians and elections. Shell is just a private company, so is fair game.

Secondly, suppose you could not advertise about shell so what? You can advertise for Greenpeace and related causes.

Greenpeace would absolutely be considered political and likely banned, considering the causes they advocate for.

Which, again, means companies like Shell could advertise all they want, but anything that calls them out would be considered political.

This is an absurd claim. Any charity advocates something, from planting trees to helping the poor.

One would have to have a purposefully obtuse definition of political speech to outlaw ads by charities but allow Shell.

Just because sometimes lines can be hard to draw, it doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be drawn.

I don't disagree. I absolutely think Twitter should draw lines. It's just intellectually dishonest to try and get around it by banning all political advertising, but it's obvious because Twitter doesn't want to take a stance on anything. So they want to act like they effectively take a stance on nothing.

Twitter isn't drawing a line in the sand as much as they are deciding to ban the whole beach and kick everyone off it.

She also asked if it’d be OK to advertise the wrong date for Election Day in a predominantly black zip code for example which I can totally see as a possibility.

No need to even think of controlling speech. But certainly ban political advertising which amounts to bribery both in theory and practice.

No one could genuinely believe that probating de-facto bribery is indistinguishable from censorship. Indeed it's very telling that banning _all_ political ads is objected to as being allegedly "biased".

> Indeed it's very telling that banning _all_ political ads is objected to as being allegedly "biased"

Easy solution that should make everyone happy: a complete ban on all forms of advertising, on all platforms, in all mediums, without any carve outs for any group, cause, or creed.

Or we can just continue to let some people mind-hack the public so that other people can get rich.

Are political propaganda and deliberate lies the type of speech the Founding Fathers were trying to protect?

The issue is who gets to be the arbiter of what counts as "political propaganda and deliberate lies"?

The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all.

I tend to think that if this is true for government, it's probably true for large corporations as well.

That restriction on governments was made alongside the granting of many exclusive rights which corporations do not have.

I think the issue is whether it still qualifies as free speech when it's paid advertisement. Inevitably the companies with the largest coffers and most to gain get a megaphone and you end up with tiers of free speech (pay to be heard).

And they are not banning political tweets...

We have rules against slander, defamation, libel, blackmail and leaking secrets, technically they are speech.

Yet we usually manage to distinguish them. I don't think this is an intractable problem.

> We have rules against slander, defamation, libel, blackmail and leaking secrets, technically they are speech.

slander/defamation/libel aren't criminal laws. It's civil law.

That's why the Covington Catholic School kid has to sue "trusted" liberal outlets which allegedly defamed him in a civil court for instant.

How did that turn out?

It's ongoing. He had been stopped on a technicality related to deadlines, but a new ruling by the court gets him past that.

Yes.

Yeah, among other things, they were.

What do you think of a world where Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan get to decide what is and isn’t “political propaganda and deliberate lies”? Because until very recently, they were “the government.”

Yes, the founding fathers were trying to protect freedom of religion, which is exactly what you just described. Do you have a problem with that?

> Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.

And, choosing not to determine the peripherey of political speech, is also political. Inaction is a choice, which by its nature supports the status quo.

I am not saying inaction, or the status quo, is necessarily good or bad, although I don't agree with the implication in the parent post that Facebook shouldn't do something.

What should be done is delicate and will always require constant negotiation, and be in flux. I am a proponent of free speech. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, is, of course, a classic example of a "surpression" of speech, and, the history of the US court system in ruling that books which were banned are legal to publish, etc, is a good example that our legal system has tools to negotiate these issues and can do so.

For the record, the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" example came from one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, which sent a man to jail for distributing anti-draft literature during WWI. The parent comment isn't necessarily guilty of this, but I've noticed that the people who approvingly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes as a justification for restrictions on free speech almost invariably have no clue about the historical context.

If I could give all the upvotes I ever had, I would assign them to this post right here. It truly saddens me that this one comment represents the exception to this entire thread rather than the majority. Doesn’t it occur to anyone that Twitter is just like any other big corporation out there and this “principled stand” is nothing more than a corporatist trampling of our basic rights? Twitter ceased to be useful to me years ago but this latest action just affirms to me that they really have no clue what freedom is.

That's what confuses me, a bit. Consider just as a hypothetical that Facebook is the single most unethical company on earth. Just as an example, whether you agree with it or not. I still wouldn't necessarily agree with what's being asked of them, to actively disallow political ads with lies. I think there's a good case to be made for just not having political ads (because of all the reasons you'd expect)... but I can understand having them, too, and it's a bit weird to me as someone who doesn't like a lot of what FB does to see the politicians die on the hill of "you must fact check everything"

It’s not weird at all, it’s a power grab. The politicians want to use social media as an excuse to become arbiters of the truth.

It’s repulsive and short-sighted, it appears to me they have forgotten or disregarded the old adage to not claim a new power you wouldn’t trust your opponents with.

They were asking Facebook to arbitrate the truth. That’s not a power grab.

“The truth” as applied to the realm of politics is very often something of substantial controversy and disagreement.

Asking a corporation to be in charge of arbitrating those disagreements doesn’t seem like the end game these politicians are actually pursuing here. Instead my interpretation of their motivation is to silence their opposition.

They are trying to setup a system where they are gatekeepers of these political disagreements, ignoring the fact that the same system will almost certainly be weaponized against them.

For what it’s worth I’m on the same “side” as these politicians for many issues, I just feel like they are playing a dangerous game here.

For nearly a decade, Donald Trump said Obama was not born in America, despite that being objectively false. Is that a position that shouldn't be silenced? What value does that objectively false assertion add to society? In 2016, pro-Trump ads targeted black voters with ads indicating the wrong day to go vote, with the goal of suppressing the black vote. What value did those objectively false assertions add to society. Why shouldn't they be silenced?

I can't understand how anyone thinks this is a reasonable argument after even ten seconds of thought, and yet it shows up reliably in every conversation on this topic.

We're talking about setting rules that span literally _billions_ of conversations. Taking fully for granted the notion that there are facts that are objective, 100% knowable facts: The question isn't about how the system handles obviously false or obviously true statements, it's how it handles everything on the margin. There were tons of things that were considered conspiracy theories that we now consider clear fact: people like you would have been the ones saying "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the CIA is drugging and torturing and raping children"[1] in America in the 1950s, or "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the government is euthanizing the disabled"[2] in 1930s Germany or any number of "obviously false" things that were very much true.

I have no reason to believe your particular example falls into that category, but the sweeping claim that arbitrating political facts is trivial is profoundly ignorant of even a tiny bit of history.

[1] Project MKUltra

[2] Aktion 44

There are literally billions of ways that a factory could poison the drinking water with toxic byproducts from their production process. Obviously a community will be significantly harmed if their drinking water is poisoned, but the community also benefits from the profits generated by the factory, so regulators set thresholds that limit harm to the community while facilitating commerce. If the product is too toxic to meet those thresholds, then the factory should stop production and find less harmful ways to make a profit.

Facebook is arguing for the right to poison the well with a literally unlimited volume of toxic disinformation, rather than figure out a way to reduce if not eliminate that harm. Perhaps they limit the number of political ads that any single account can view to some small number. Perhaps they can only fact-check ads on topics that reach a certain view-count level. Or if it's too difficult of an engineering problem for Facebook to not poison the well, then they can stop hosting political ads.

Facebook is already arbitrating the truth. If you share a link or post an ad, it can be automatically annotated by an "independent third party fact checker", which they have a few of. But if it's an ad that is specifically from a political candidate, there is no fact checking done. Of course, these ads are mixed into your news feed with just a small "Sponsored" note.

If Facebook had not started its fact checking system nobody would be asking it to fact check political ads now.

This point of view is kinda incoherent. These platforms are not open. They're owned. And the owners can decide what you can and cannot say on it. In the end, if they think that some kinds of expression are not good for them, they not only have the right, but from a corporate perspective, a responsibility to their enterprise to end that expression on their platform.

Pressure from lawmakers and the public alike can change their policies. And we can always vote with our feet.

Someone tried to put up that ad and Facebook took it down. But wasn't it "just" deceptive clickbait advertising for a political position against Facebook? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook/fac...

Here is the full video of the "Conservatives for a Green New Deal" ad by the Really Online Lefty League PAC:

https://youtu.be/cvRbZJXTE5E

There's a difference between opinion and facts/lies. Opinion is fine, but when someone is spreading an objective lie (the earth is flat!)... that's where it seems like this is a cop out for Facebook to pretend they can't get involved due to "free speech". Sure, let people share opinions, but not lies and misinformation.

Who should adjudicate what is an is not a lie? Twitter’s response is basically “we don’t want to be the ones to do that”

Same way it works for newspapers and tv and radio.

"The Green New Deal. Who really supports it? Click here to find out more."

Just move the propaganda two hops away.

would already greatly diminish the effect. Two hops away is a magnitude or two less of exposure.

When Spain changed organ donations from opt-in to opt-out the rate increased from 30% to 9x%. That's one tick of a box.

I see these comments a lot and I don't know if people purposefully try to downplay the role of smart design because they pursue an agenda or if people seriously don't recognise how significant small changes in design can be.

If we'd manage to hide false information behind two clicks we'd have done the world a great service.

Likewise, I always see these statements and they come across very disingenuous.

I agree. In terms of twitter's decision though.... This could either support their decision or the opposite.

Being the arbitar of truth is both an unavoidable demand and an impossible task for Twitter. Being a "public square" where politics is decided/discussed makes the implications of this problem especially acute. Fairness, whatever that means, is doubly important in democratic media.

Their detractors (and would-be regulators) will ultimately demand a "corporate policy" and judge them by their inconsistency... Why is this banned and not that? That is, a set of rules applied in all circumstances. Clear legible rules applied consistently is where cracks in theories like "truth and lies are easily discernable" inevitably appear.

It's an impossibly hard line to police. "This is a political ad," OTOH, is an easier judgement to make. Contraversial decisions would be tolerable too, deeming one and political but not another. East is probably an overstatement, but political/not-political is easier than truth/lies

There will never be a successful community without some level of moderation. It is better for us to define the levels of moderation than have a organization start adjudicating truth.

That depends on what we mean by "successful." The early chans were very moderation free -- 4chan initially didn't censor, then they started censoring furry content but not pedo content, then the furry ban got removed, then the pedo ban finally kicked in, and they've had more censorship since... but the initial seed was practically not moderated, and most of the moderation that has been put in place since seems like a result of legal fears (the brief furry ban being an obvious exception). The bitmessage chans are still moderation free, and will be as long as the bitmessage network has nodes, but of course that can't scale (for anyone unfamiliar, every bitmessage node tries to decrypt every message -- this means that there is no need for metadata concerning where a message was sent to, and since packets are forwarded across the network you'd have to be running multiple nodes to even guess where a message is coming from, but there's no way that everybody could recieve and try to decrypt everybody else's messages if the whole world used such a system). I'm not arguing that I want a system without moderation, just that such communities have existed, have grown, and do exist. My ideal would be a community with opt-in/opt-out moderation, but I also don't wish every community to reflect my ideals.

But the laws associated political advertising on TV aren’t really up for debate in the US.

They worked, and then came attempts to avoid campaign finance laws.

Choosing not to take money for potential political advertisements is good business for the owners of a public forum.

If it’s easy to verify, it’ll be good for anyone that cares about knowing what true public opinion looks like.

How about ... freedom of speech?

Quit trying to micro manage everyone.

Accept payment to publish messages on a competitive platform - and let readers, being mostly competent adults, figure content out themselves.

I’d take it a step further and limit who is allowed to vote. You mention competent adults; an adult in 1800 was probably competent around 16 years of age. An adult today is similarly competent at a later age.

Regardless of competency, there should be some eligibility requirements to vote. Holding a job should be one. Proof of citizenship should be another.

I very rarely downvote comments here as a matter of principle but yours here is almost comically absurd.

1. Do you have any evidence that people were more competent at a younger age in 1800? In fact I would think that the opposite is probably true - but again this seems impossible to prove so I'm simply asking you if you have any reason to believe what you're saying is true other than your feelings.

2. People without jobs have just as many rights as those with jobs. Do you also think people without land should not vote? Perhaps not women? Maybe black votes should have less of an impact? I'm curious if you're not American- maybe this would explain a cultural difference I am missing?

At least be consistent with the despicable point you are making!

How does flipping burgers qualify you to have a say in how to run a country?

Take away votes from the uneducated, the criminal, the insane, people with low IQ, and the tax dodging millionaires.

The entire point is that more money doesn’t lead to disproportionately more speech.

And if readers were ‘mostly competent’, and able to decipher the truth, we wouldn’t even be having this convo

Deciphering truth is up to the individual. You don't get to declare yourself the authority thereon, empowered to control what others hear based on what you deem "truth".

Strange how many purporting to wave the banner of "equality and diversity" want absolute control over others, rather than respect the natural sovereignty of the individual.

I am sorry but when has money not meaning more speech ever been true in practice? Even in Communist Dictatorships it didn't hold as those with power also had money effectively.

Printing presses and distribution were expensive - even more so back in the day and before their invention it held - arguably even more so.

It may be a good ideal for having ideas standing on their own weight but a precedent it is not.

Obviously such questions were manipulative grandstanding. The only way to win the political rhetoric game is not to play. That's what twitter is doing.

I generally comprehend "grandstanding" in the common language to not only be seeking attention but to misrepresent false or unimportant information for the sake of gaining that attention. Does my definition mesh with yours or how would you find that quote to be misrepresenting a problem in society?

While her question could seem to be reductive, I think it's accurately reducing the question to a point where the answer is easily approachable to most people and, while often time the actual advertisements less obvious lies in practice, a lot of facebook advertisements are knowingly spreading falsehoods and that is hurting the political dialog.

oh her questions were more reasonable than others, like for example the question about the sexual orientations of Libra association member boards. Still, her question about what constitutes a political lie is not representative of 99% of political lies , which are usually more subtle and subject to debate. Also, his response "we should let the people see for themselves the lies and judge politicians accordingly" was not really countered at all.

>“. . . was not really countered at all”

That was probably the only point Zuckerberg made that I agree with, though I don’t doubt that we think that way for different reasons.

If I know social networks are deleting ads or posts that are deemed untruthful then 1) how do I see who determines the truthfulness of the network’s content and 2) how can I trust that nothing else is being removed at will? It’s a classic argument.

Personally, I trust myself to filter through information and make informed decisions; more so than Facebook or Twitter. I think that many people prefer not to make informed political decisions on their own for a variety of reasons. Be it a lack of time, ambition, or research knowledge, it harms us as a whole when we allow ourselves to be told what political opinions to hold.

What if the networks aren't deleting the content but just not distributing it to you? For example, Facebook determines what shows up on my newsfeed. If my friend posts something, and Facebook guesses that I won't be interested in it, it won't show on my newsfeed (I think) or it will be buried in the less important section. It may still exist on my friend's wall because he posted it, but I don't see it unless I actively go to his wall.

So even if the networks don't delete the content, they are already determining what we should and shouldnt see, no?

I’m not sure how much of the population would agree with me here, but I would prefer to be shown content organically. I’m talking posts sorted chronologically, not cherry picked for me, just the raw feed essentially.

Having an algorithm or AI determine what I will or won’t see on a social media page is marginally better than a person deciding that no one should see that content. With that said, my bottom line here is that I would prefer that my internet experience go completely untampered with. I come online to discover new things that I wouldn’t see otherwise. Whether that’s a new hobby or a political falsehood, I want to discover and form an opinion on it myself.

after reading Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier I have come to realize that trust is a really difficult thing to implement online. Look at how hard it is for Amazon to police counterfeit items or fake reviews.

I agree with your general points, but I'll argue against their relative priority.

You're saying that all speech is somehow political. I agree. Yet you must admit that on an advertising platform, there are some forms of political speech (e.g., the type allowed by ad buys) that, in lieu of some external regulation, will be _inherently_ biased. That is, the economic arrangement can only pit one group against another.

The only _true_ solution to this problem is a platform where the stakeholders (users) also govern all parts of the platform like a common pooled resource. But we know this cannot happen because, well, capitalism.

So I do not discount your claim that all goings-on in public fora are inherently political, I'll just pit two concrete facts against your abstract observation: 1) limiting political ad buys will be less bad than not limiting political ad buys and 2 we can only start really reasoning about your abstract concept of relative existential truths after we fundamentally fix a fundamentally broken economic and technical arrangement.

One of the better questions she asked was, "should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?"

Zuck's response was, "well, I think it's BAD if you LIE. Telling lies is bad." but wouldn't say that Facebook would moderate that kind of content.

I personally don't see a legitimate free speech claim saying that political parties should be allowed to target opponents with plain, simple falsehoods like that (which already happen through the mail system, mind), but I'm open to hear.

I ask because speech is already restricted when it comes to advertising; companies are compelled to put up disclaimers, the FTC will come down on misleading ads, etc.

So, if society's surviving okay with those restrictions, is there a reason that political chicanery shouldn't be held to some standard also?

What is the free speech argument for not drawing a line at that?

> "should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?"

Would that actually be legal? Are you allowed to try to suppress the vote like that?

It is 100% legal to send mailers or put up billboards (which are not as regulated as shared spectrum for TV/radio) with the wrong election date to people, and this happens a couple of times every election cycle. Sometimes its government agencies, sometimes its a campaign (first example that popped up when googling: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/politics/spin-cycle/zeld...). I don't think any of them has been investigated by the FEC.

It's funny that I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments to reach a discussion that I think really highlights the crux of the problem. We know that social media platforms will take down content that is illegal. The issue is that it's legal for political parties (or anybody) to post false or misleading statements for the purposes of political propaganda.

AOC's hypothetical ad shouldn't be policed by Facebook, it should be policed by the police, or at the very least be an example of criminal defamation that is handled in the court system. I Am Clearly Not A Lawyer but I am surprised by looking at the existing legislation on criminal defamation that it's not.

We also shouldn't ignore that we are talking about ads. You can post political messages on Twitter, but Twitter won't promote that message in exchange for money. Facebook should follow suit.

I believe Zuckerberg's answer to that question was that such an ad would be banned. It's an explicit exception in the policy that permits lying in political ads, an exception that bans lies in service of voter suppression.

To the broader question, about whether all lies in political ads should be banned, the free speech argument against is that while it's easy to invent easy and obvious cases of lying, enforcing that policy in reality is very difficult and puts Facebook in the position of censoring speech that one side may consider a truth and the other may consider a lie.

He did not provide a bright line answer and hemmed and hawed quite a bit. He tried to reframe as “harm” but of course provided no clear definition there. So there’s “some” undefined policy that might maybe apply. He and the PR team really flubbed the obvious questions showing I think how uncomfortable and unclear they are internally about their policy and where to draw the line.

Sure outright lying in a way that can put someone in danger (e.g. printing false instruction on medical drug) should not be allowed. The question is what should be the mechanism to do that. One way is to use courts, where everyone will get a fair hearing, rules will be the same for everybody, and won't change often. Another is to use Facebook moderators as judges, which does not seem to be a very promising path.

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