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Comment by product50 | Hacker News Reader

So why not use the same methodology on TV or print as well and ban political ads across? Why is social media singled out here? What about ads on YouTube? This is nothing but a copout solution. Twitter doesn't have the will nor the capital to be part of the debate here (and political ads are likely too small for them to care) - so they are trying to gain strategy credit by just saying this is a bad idea.

NYTimes is happy to take money for political ads while they are shouting that FB and Twitter should do fact checks.

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IMO the difference is a combination of two things:

* the unprecedented targeting ability of social media ads vs traditional broadcast/print * the unprecedented amount of disinformation (especially from foreign governments) vs traditional broadcast/print

If you can't see the difference between the two, frankly, you haven't been paying attention.

Foreign govt can also pay for political ads via TV/print as well. Most of the foreign govt interference is not via ads but via organic channels such as FB Pages, FB user accounts, Twitter accounts/bots. Those will continue to operate regardless of this decision by Twitter

Perhaps because of hyper targeting? News media and fact check sites cannot even see some ads that are shown since they are not in the target market, so they cannot fact check or report on them.

Facebook has a public database where all political ads are visible to anyone. Media is free to report on them.

Unless another recourse is found then banning all political ads will increase the role prior name recognition plays in politics. It is difficult for lesser known politicians to overcome incumbents and this would make it even more difficult.

Another recourse, would, for example, be unbiased open debates where candidates can promote themselves, I think this is a great idea personally but it won't work without

1. Public funding.

2. Actual enforcement of the unbiased natures of these debates.

It's harder/impossible to deliver hyper-personalized political ads in those other mediums.

It's worth taking some time to figure out the ramifications of all this.

TV and print outlets already exercise discretion on what they allow. Are you under the impression that they do not?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/business/media/cnn-trump-...

CNN rejecting Trump ads is akin to Fox rejecting Warren ads given how they are politically aligned. Facebook is trying to be neutral here and let people (and journalists who will write on such ads) decide vs. trying to come in with their own judgment. This has been happening on TV/Print ads for decades now.

Fox News has rejected Trump ads too: https://time.com/5445246/fox-nbc-facebook-controversial-trum...

But go ahead and make this a partisan thing.

If you are under the delusion that print and TV media is duly fact checking all political ads, then you are free to believe what you want.

The burden of proof would be on you.

Given how many fewer ads they have to deal with, that is probably true.

It is still shocking to me that in 2019 people still view Fox News and CNN as having anywhere close a mirror level of political bias.

The funny thing is that I don't know which way you are shocked. If they aren't mirror-biased, which one is more biased?

Fox News obviously.

Note that this is "in 2019" though. Fox News hired Donna Brazile, who worked as head of the DNC.

Fox News has hired many democrats in the past. That doesn't mean their content doesn't meet the same muster of more professional news organizations that don't have narratives that are delivered from the top down.

Again, it's 2019.

Roger Ailes is gone as of July 2016. There is no longer anybody conservative running Fox News. Median political opinion in the USA (maybe not your neighborhood) is to the right of Fox News. To maximize audience, Fox News is as left as it can go without being left of any notable competitor. Because there is no significant competition to the right, Fox News can grab more audience by going left.

Meanwhile, over at CNN, there actually is a narrative delivered from the top down. Every day at 9 AM, Jeff Zucker has a call in which he directs the anti-Trump message of the day. Info about it got leaked a couple weeks ago: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/10/14/exposecnnpart1/

Following that leak there have been several more: https://www.projectveritas.com/category/content/in-the-news/

Jeff Zucker gets directly involved. He even went into the control room during an interview to disable ads, extend a 7-minute interview to 25 minutes, and instruct the interviewer to “Just fucking nail her!” in reference to guest Kellyanne Conway. He says “I am the one saying we should just stay on impeachment.”

An employee laments that “we used to cover news,” and “we used to go out and do stories.”

So this is 2019. Don't be the frog slowly boiled in the pot. CNN has been very badly corrupted by narratives that are delivered from the top down.

> This is nothing but a copout solution.

Who's solution is a copout?

You're saying that it is inconsistent for Twitter to not accept payment for political ads, but a print newspaper to do so. This is correct. But that inconsistency reflects the fact that the decisions are being made by different people.

What would be a non-copout solution that twitter could implement?

Twitter can just follow Facebook here and let public/journalists evaluate the truthfulness of the campaigns vs. doing it themselves (as that is open to interpretation). If print media and TV channels can do that, why can't social media?

And why is a copout bad?

If we a society decide that Twitter shouldn't be the arbiter of valid and invalid political advertising, why is them avoiding the issue entirely a bad thing?

Campaign financing is illegal in most of the first world. In the US there have even been multiple supreme court rules on the subject.

It's probably because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have blamed a small Facebook ad campaign for losing their campaign, so the hysteria has built from that.

I'm totally fine banning all political ads, let's do it!

Then only a few named candidates will have most of the leverage. Is that what we want?

Surely we can come up with some way of giving candidates a platform to share their ideas? The current system is broken, we should think of ways of fixing it instead of just saying we can't do better.

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