Zuckerberg doubles down on Facebook political ads policy after Twitter ban
thehill.com
thehill.com
It's interesting how hard Zuck is working to try and conflate the idea of 'free speech' with paid advertisements. To put it another way, if advertising on Facebook is part of my free speech, surely Zuck must run my adverts despite the fact I have no money to pay him for them.
If, let's say, a group advocating for the abolishment of asset forfeiture wants to communicate their message, and the media is not covering it, it would be natural for them to try paying for ads, and the obvious place to put ads are on social media, since that's where the eyeballs are (cf, the collapse of the news media). If social media bans those ads then while the group clearly still has free speech, they will have little way to meaningfully exercise it.
You might say - and I'd certainly agree - that the real problem is a world where everyone is on Twitter and Facebook to the exclusion of all else, and thus a world where 3-4 CEOs can unilaterally decide that nobody needs to hear anything about asset forfeiture (or whatever). And yet, that's the world we're in.
(You also don't seem to understand what "free speech" is. By your logic, a law banning the purchase television ads for Democratic candidates - but allowing the purchase of television ads for Republicans - would be okay, because after all, those ads cost money, so it's not restricting the Democratic candidates right to free speech. That's absurd, no?)
If a group wants to post on social media, they can just post on social media. Ads increase the reach of those with money. That is exactly what they do and nothing more. Why would we want to further amplify the voice of those who have money? The fact that the cause is the abolition of X or the support of Y is a non sequitur, in either case it is the viewpoint of someone with the money to promote their voice.
I have very little concern that the opinions of those with large quantities of money at their disposal are underrepresented in politics, or do not have the ability to make their voices heard.
What you're missing is that all viewpoints you'll ever see are intrinsically those of someone with the money to promote their voice.
Suppose you have an idea in your head and you want to get it out there. The first thing you have to do is express that idea. Write it down or create a video etc. That takes time, which is an opportunity cost. If it takes you an hour, that's an hour you couldn't spend working for money, which means that somebody who has to spend that time working for money doesn't have the time to express their idea.
On top of that, the more time you spend polishing your expression, the more convincing you can make it, so right off the bat there is a direct relationship between time/money and speech.
Then you need to get people to look at it. If all you do is write a document that sits in a drawer in your house, nobody will ever see it. So you need to spend more time distributing your idea, or get other people who are willing to spend their time distributing it.
Political advertising is just paying a third party to do that for you. It costs less than hiring a staff of people to promote the idea "organically" (otherwise it would be poor value for money and nobody would pay for it), which means it enables people with less money to get their message in front of people.
If I may jump in here, I live in a country where political advertisement is strictly regulated and almost all political debate takes place on public television, available to everyone, and there's a commitment to neutrality in reporting and equal representation of all parties.
Now this surely doesn't give everyone the same voice and many people are still marginalised and despite the lack of money involvement are excluded, but it may be worth pointing out that the US status quo is not the only model on this planet.
Instead of increasing the asymmetry by letting those with more money expand their influence even more, you could take measures to level the playing field.
Conversely, targeted advertisement lets you bombard people with certain inclinations with ads that nudge them to behave in a certain way. That isn't free speech, its targeted manipulation. The targeting is whats important here. For selling goods and services, its fine. For selling leaders or tarnishing leaders, its evil.
> it would be natural for them to try paying for ads, and the obvious place to put ads are on social media
It would be natural to them to post to their Facebook page because that's what social media is for and then for their committed network of supporters to repost etc.
Remember - that's the advantage of social media - you can quickly get the work out to your supporters without having to go through intermediaries, or having to pay for advertising.
> you can quickly get the work out to your supporters without having to go through intermediaries, or having to pay for advertising.
How do you think Facebook makes money? And as a followup, why do you think people pay money to run ads on Facebook?
Like, I 100% agree with you that this is how it should work, and it's how we all thought it would work 15 years ago, but it feels oddly disconnected from the world we live in.
It might push the platforms to feed people with an equal share of all sides instead of feeding them what the "want" and anyone else has to pay
People disseminate unpaid political messages all the time. Curated feeds or not, they are seeing things which are popular amongst them and they reshare posts they like.
You can argue that people aren't interested enough in politics, but paid ads are not a good and balanced way to get people engaged. It leads to them having an even more skewed view of politics as it biases them towards the interest of those with the most money for political ads (as opposed to what is best for their community). Those interest can align in theory, but if we are trying to select the optimal system, why add paid advertisements if we don't need to?
Nitpick: IMHO, feeds aren't curated, since curation implies some kind of human judgement at the least (and preferably an expert's judgement). Feeds are algorithmically sorted. Calling them curated debases the term.
To be clear, my objection isn't to all online advertising but specifically to Zuckerberg defending Facebook's policy with an appeal to free speech. Obviously speech without funding is weak an ineffective, but if Facebook voluntarily chose to eliminate all political advertising, it is irrational to claim that your freedom of speech has been curtailed. Facebook's existence isn't promised to you.
If you aren't wielding the megaphone that is twitter/fb/youtube/whatever, then you are not going to be heard. That's just a fact at this point. Social media has in fact lowered the barrier to entry for expressing speech to large audiences, because before social media there were only newspapers and TV networks that cost significantly more and had significantly more preference towards specific agendas.
I understand the ideological desire for that not to be the case, and maybe society could stop and think how to fulfil that desire, but ignoring the facts of today is not constructive at all.
I disagree. This is only a blanket statement to be taken as fact.
Politicians have been doing town halls, focus groups, and public speeches for decades. Just because we suddenly have social media sites to project their voices to a mich larger audience doesn’t erase all of those. While spending on digital ads have gone up tremendously i’m sure, if we take them out of the equation, people will still be able to hear their candidates voices. Social media websites are not the be-all and end-all of political discourse.
I don't disagree with you! And I think if you'll look around, you'll see it is true. Your ability to get your viewpoint out is, perhaps more than at any other time since the 19th century, dependent on it being deemed acceptable by a handful of powerful gatekeepers. Between the incredible amount of consolidation we've seen in media companies, the dominance Google has on search, the dominance Apple and Google have on app stores, and the dominance a small handful of social media and messaging corporations have on communication, it's kind of amazing how few entities control what so many get to see in every context.
I really, really welcome suggestions on how to fix this. But I don't think pretending it doesn't exist is the answer.
The problem with your initial argument is that paid political ads give even more power to the gatekeepers. It also overlooked the issue that more money equals more speech, meaning grassroots political movements are at an even bigger disadvantage because of the disparity of funds than if everyone had to get their message out organically.
the is the problem with free speech, you accept you will have both and good and hopefully with a preponderance of free speech the good will out weigh the bad.
once you start trying to limit who and where you give bad speech the edge because those who set the rules also determine which is which
the real threat to free speech and democracy is from those sitting in office successfully scaring the people into letting them set limits on who can say anything and what they can say when in reality the only group that should face any such limits are those in office and those beholden to them and the party they represent.
Democracy as a system dispowers the individual (what is a single voice in a sea of milions). It is perfectly rational to not vote (your single vote would never matter, while the time it takes to go vote will).
Since most people want to spend their lives infinity-scrolling a facebook feed, and for some reason political power can be derived from these people, then facebook will have power by deciding what these people get to see, and if it's not facebook then it's twitter, or google, or the ISP, or the department of the internet, or the TV channels, so on and so forth.
only 0.1% of people care about free platform.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" has been a cliche for a long, long time, and while it is a little flip, there's a truth there. Your freedom of speech does not require me or anyone else to amplify it. Or even listen.
Put another way, do you believe you should be forced to tell other people my message? What about everyone else's?
Everything was fine back when the newspapers had a healthy tension between revenues and credibility. And when the sheer quantity of advertising venues was small and the advertisements devoid of third-order ulterior motives.
Until we can reign in the excesses of online advertising, it's more prudent to be cautious than dive further into the abyss.
Another solution would be to allow the ads but disallow personalized targeting.
- Twitter: no political ads - Facebook: any political ads, including lying.
It would be nice to at LEAST have an agreement that ads saying things that are objectively incorrect should not be run.
For example, if I ran an ad that said "Hacker News was owned by Rupert Murdock" (which is false) then this ad should be blocked.
There might need to be some penalty applied retroactively. Like if you're busted running a fake political ad your company is on timeout for 60 days.
To be fair, I realize this is a difficult problem this is why we might have to add a penalty period.
Surely we can live in a world where we have facts, right?
Then I would say you are living in artificial world delightful for advertisers. I have a Twitter account that I have not really used in a decade and nobody else in my family has ever touched Twitter. My wife has a Facebook account she uses to keep in touch with family, but nobody else in my family has a Facebook account. I know MANY people in my professional world who have neither.
To that end, I think your position is contradictory. If X group has a moral right to use their money to promote speech via ads, why shouldn't media owners have the same right to use their money to promote speech via their platforms?
obviously i don't know much about this area...if anyone has canonical references they could point to i'd love to learn more.
The game we want is one where political movements can organically gain traction based on popularity.
In this world where political ads are banned, movements don't need financiers to be as successful as they could be. In your example, it's ironic you mention the civil forfeiture movement, because they are exactly the type of people who aren't spending money on ads. PACs and Super PACs for election campaigns are doing the spending. I wish you would acknowledge this.
Yes, I don't see anything wrong with that.
If I choose to print 1,000 flyers to hand out, I am using money to amplify my voice. Do you see anything wrong with this?
Facebook Ads are no different.
If you were to buy the entire newspaper's advertising space to amplify your voice I would definitely consider it an abuse of power and wrong.
The freedom of advocacy is inseparable from the freedom of speech. It costs money to print pamphlets, buy air time, pay people to stand on the corner, conduct opinion polls, etc.
Say that you or I have a novel political idea that we want to advocate for. How do you propose that we do so? We'd probably form a non-profit, spend money contacting potential allies, convince them on the merits of our case and to donate to us, then spend that money on pamphlets, TV, radio ads, etc. That's freedom at work.
If paid advertisements are not free speech, then the concept of free speech would cease to exist beyond street corner rants.
The case Zuck wants to make is that he should be free from the consequences of choosing to take money to distribute lies. He wants to do so by claiming its his obligation to give free speech to politicians but this is clearly rubbish - it's a protection no other megaphone vendor has. Take CNN for example, they can and do refuse to broadcast some political adverts because they have an obligation. An obligation that Zuckerberg contents shouldn't exist. What he is advocating for is a fundamental re-definition of what free speech in the US means.
Per the First Amendment, Zuck can do whatever he likes with his platform. He can refuse to broadcast whatever he wants, just like CNN and other news networks. But just as important, he is free to NOT refuse to broadcast whatever he pleases. There are no legal consequences for that (outside of the narrow exceptions in Brandenburg v Ohio).
The argument that he is making is that he wants Facebook to be a platform that upholds the ideal of free speech. Whether or not Facebook follows through and actually practices this philosophy equally, remains to be seen.
The "free from consequences" argument is a thin rationalization for political thuggery. You can't make your case intellectually, so you're going to go after people's livelihoods.
This is a problem far greater than literally anything that could be broadcast in a radio spot. And for now, the photocopiers and push pollers still exist no matter what happens with Facebook.
Except no one has proposed banning bots, machine learning, or shutting down anonymous actors. Those are all boogeymen.
Any paid ad can be required to be transparent to whatever degree we want to impose on the advertiser.
That's why, honestly phrased, this question would be, "will my side continue to stay in power if the other side is allowed to get their message out?"
We want free speech, not a lawless society. I hope.
To your point, how is there no way to police threatening messages advertised on facebook? It seems quite easy to figure out who paid for the ad if they are indeed breaking the law with threats.
The flawed argument Zuck made is that in order to have free speech we must have paid speech. That's a self-serving fallacy.
There's a difference between paying for printing costs and paying a middle man to distribute your message to an arbitrary number of people, especially when that middle man has zero accountability and zero marginal cost.
> No one is saying paid speech is not free speech.
The parent to whom I was responding said "It's interesting how hard Zuck is working to try and conflate the idea of 'free speech' with paid advertisement", implying that they believe that paid speech is not free speech.
> The flawed argument Zuck made is that in order to have free speech we must have paid speech.
Zuck never said that. From the article, he is quoted as having said: "Ads can be an important part of voice - especially for candidates and advocacy groups the media might not otherwise cover so they can get their message into debates,"
Paid advertising is not fundamentally different from these.
Hey, if you liked this one, but need a more recent example, you should try getting together with a bunch of people, setting up a little not-for-profit organization[1], soliciting donations, and using that money to make a documentary about your political opponents, decrying them as unfit for public office -- then get in a court case with the FEC telling you that you can't show the movie, because there's going to be an election.
[1] Not a 501(c)(3) charity, mind you; donations aren't tax-deductible. Just a 501(c)(4) not-for-profit.
Paine got his message out by contracting with for-profit publishers to disseminate his book. Facebook is just the new version of that.
Maybe both forms of money entangled speech are worthy of the same protections. But they are two different things.
Advertisers put the speech in front of people whether they want to buy it or not.
https://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-s...
Free means legally unrestricted by the state here, not free of payment or of private guidelines.
My free speech rights include the right to pay for an advertisement to get across my message or to join with others to do so. Progressives dominate the media and academia and want to shut down other outlets.
Don't y'all have Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting?
Yes, I know we are discussing private censorship which is more acceptable than government censorship. But if FB wants to be considered a general platform, they have to be careful filtering content, including ads.
Free speech at least in the US is protected by the constitution so if this was a free speech issue it wouldn't be on the table because the answer would be: you can't restrict it.
They want the speech which is best for their business. What else are they, a corporation, supposed to want?
But the same holds true of the general use of public airwaves. If they are owned or controlled by a select group of people who sit on the boards, their voice and preferences are going to be a lot more powerful than your average joe on the street.
It is really more than awkward to use "free speech" to advocate for something that is, inherently, not free.
Nothing new, just some sugar coating of 'We Need That Ads Money, are you kidding me?'
If his argument was "free speech" he wouldn't have had to support it with "so they can get their message into debates". Why would "free speech" require supporting evidence.
Looks like you are the one doing the conflation :D .
Separately, while some politics revolves around untestable statements of preference (e.g. Purple team “freedom is more important than equality” vs. Teal team “equality is the best foundation upon which freedom can be built”), there are also statements of fact and it is dangerous to allow demonstrably false claims to spread (Antivaxxers are probably the least controversial example of a dangerously wrong meme on this forum, but others exist all the way back to ancient Greek democracy).
Democracy isn’t Magic: If Antivaxxers got 99.9% of the votes they would still be wrong, the only difference is they would cause more harm.
It's not a coherent comment in the context of the US 1st amendment.
And by the way, the First Amendment disallows not only prior restraint, but many other government restraints on speech as well. It's just that prior restraint is considered the most egregious and hence subject to the greatest judicial scrutiny.
The main issue I have with this is how Facebook strategically blends advertisements (which is often political during election cycles) together with organic non-sponsored content.
Anecdote: My 84 year old grandmother spends 1-2 hours per day scrolling through Facebook's news feed. When I watch her do it, she pays ZERO attention to why she's seeing a specific piece of content (to her, there's no difference between a post that's labeled "Sponsored" versus an organic post from a family member). In other words, for my grandmother, Facebook has not done an effective job at informing her when she's viewing a paid advertisement vs. organic non-sponsored content. This is a clear form of user manipulation that needs to stop.
Even when I scroll through Facebook, I often don't notice the "Sponsored" label on posts until after I've already read most of the post.
To me, the primary issue is that Facebook does not adequately differentiate organic content from sponsored content.
At least when watching television, it's absolutely clear when you're watching paid-for commercials - it's harder to manipulate someone's beliefs when they know they're watching a commercial. But with Facebook, a huge percentage of users don't know when they're interacting with an advertisement vs. organic content - this is the problem that I think needs solving.
> Zuck: "Instead, I believe the better approach is to work to increase transparency. Ads on Facebook are already more transparent than anywhere else."
In what way is Facebook transparent? Do they mean they simply disclose political ad spend? Or do they legitimately think they're doing a good job at properly labeling paid-for content?
Yes. It has a "Paid for by ____" header in addition to the sponsored designation
The reason it’s different with Facebook (even though it’s been going on in Magazines forever) is the scale of it. Magazines are ubiquitous but the average American does not spend 1-3 hours per day on reading magazines (minutes at most). But Facebook... it’s at a whole other level in terms of the magnitude of people reached and the magnitude of attention being captured.
What might not matter in Magazines May very well matter for Facebook based on the scale of the impact.
That is not true, product placement can be very subtle and even when it's not, it's not like the actors look at the camera and say "This show brought to you by X" even when it really is.
But there is more revenue than just that. FB allows advertisers to reach specific audiences, and even create lookalikes, so overall, there will be a %age of the users seeing more ads than me, potentially personalized for them, and average revenue per user would be higher.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/q3...
Also, the numbers you posted include all the inventory - facebook news feed, ads on the side right on desktop, instagram, messenger ads, stories ads, instant articles, and even the ad network. According to facebook (read somewhere) 70% of their ads are on the ad network.
This is why you can’t pay to get a version of The NY Times that has no ads.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/facebooks-revenue-topped-5-p...
This is a classic isolated demand for rigor. “Sponsored” is exactly as prominent on Facebook as “op-ed” is on newspapers and “advertisement” is on whole sponsored segments of magazines. In all cases that word is there at the top in a normal font. What else are they supposed to do, make it flashing and rainbow colored? Why not complain about newspapers not doing that?
For those that haven't seen it, here's some backstory on one piece about the Trinidad election: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/t...
But basically, a political campaign was started around NOT voting as a form of protest. And those were targeted to the opposing party etc..
It is one thing if political ads were just about informing the public about a candidate, but we are far past that. This is a question about the legitimacy of our democracy now.
Anybody have any bright ideas on how to apply pressure on Facebook to do the same as Twitter? This feels to me like one of the more important questions of our (immediate) time since it effects absolutely everything.
> Nix moved on to pitch his next case study – a youth mobilisation campaign. Again, all is not as it seems. “Trinidad is a very interesting case history of how we look at problems,” Nix said. “Trinidad's tiny – it's 1.3 million people – but almost exactly half the country are Indian and half the country are Black, Afro-Caribbean. And there are two main political parties, one for the Blacks and one for the Indians… when the Indians are in power the Blacks don't get anything, and vice-versa, you know – they screw each other. So we were working, I think for the third time in Trinidad, and we were working for the Indians, and we did a huge amount for research, and two really important things came out.
> “One was that all the youth, Indian and Afro-Caribbean, felt disenfranchised … And secondly, amongst the Indians the familial hierarchies were really strong. There was huge respect for their elders and their parents and their families, but not so for the Afro-Caribbeans. And that was enough information to inform the entire campaign.
> “We went to the client and said, we only want to do one thing, we want to run a campaign where we target the youth – all youth, all the Blacks and all the Indians – and we try and increase apathy. And they didn't really understand why… but they allowed us to do this campaign, and the campaign had to be non-political, because no one, the kids don’t care about politics. It had to be reactive, because they’re lazy; inclusive of all ethnicities; bottom-up. It had to be exciting, because kids want to do something fun.
> “We came up with this campaign which was all about ‘Be part of the gang, do something cool, be part of a movement.’ And it was called the ‘Do So’ campaign… A3 posters. And graffiti, yellow paint, you know, we cut stencils with the jigsaw… And we'd give these to kids, and they'd get in their cars at night, you know, just make a drawing, get in the car, and race around the country putting up these posters and getting chased by the police and all their friends were doing it, and it was fucking brilliant fun…
> “Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.
> “And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”
The same caveats went for all the "psychological targeting" they bragged about a few years ago; there is precious little evidence that it is better than targeting roughly by political party, which we've had for decades. For its power, we only have their word to go on.
Yes, this was primarily a physical campaign, but it drives home the point of how these people work. And how they DID work in 2016 as well with respect to targeted advertising on Facebook.
Watch the movie if you haven't, this stuff was well researched by various reporters. It isn't perfect but it certainly shows that what we have now is not tenable if we want to maintain a democracy.
Another tool in the arsenal of the rich and powerful to give them more of a voice than the average person, is another way to look at it.
Facebook are profiting from both sides. They’re a news site that’s simultaneously FOX News and MSNBC all at once. But I still have to agree with Zuckerberg on this: enforcing misinformation shouldn’t be left to a private company.
Facebook has already said they have no problem enforcing this for non-politicians, after all.
I doubt few of the FB users I know wouldn't part with $3 in exchange for their network/contacts that FB provides.
Average revenue per user in the US/Canada is $26.76 [0] per user per year. Globally, the average is over $6.
I'd wager a bet that the ARPU for users willing to pay $30/yr for no ads is even greater than $27 - likely above $100 - because the only people who would pay extra to remove ads are people with disposable income (which are usually the exact people advertisers want to target when trying to sell stuff).
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
You may balk at Apple’s high prices but at least you’ve chosen not to pay.
Also, maybe the costs of running facebook's infrastructure and code drop (and employee headcount, etc) off dramatically if they take an axe to all the parts of it that are devoted to advertising and user data tracking/sales and just focus on the useful core tech bits, which also helps increase the profit margin on the new income model. It's possible there's a rational price that the masses would pay that would still turn them a profit under this kind of setup.
If they charged $3 per month they would be making less money than they are now, even if nobody quit because it's no longer free.
The rich and powerful already have exponentially more of a voice than the average person -- media corporations are privately owned, after all, and no one is suggesting that we prevent them from making political statements. Banning political advertising is basically saying that people or groups with thousands or millions of dollars to spend shouldn't be able to get their message out -- only billionaires should be able to do that.
In official capacity (under oath) it's illegal for us to lie to them. In their official capacity (under oath of office) they get to lie all day long, straight through their teeth. CEOs can't defraud their shareholders, but politicians can do so every day of their lives.
To me, the problem is these kinds of sponsored posts undermine that by not enforcing the attribution, by being more ephemeral than TV or print ads, and by allowing specific enough targeting to exclude anyone who might call it out.
Why did we think this was a good idea again? Ask China their opinion on the value of being the one to decide what is true.
Even if we go with consensus, it's such a difficult problem to solve in this age of internet where new content is created at such a rapid pace.
They need to stop braying about turning into China and admit that this a new ball game. That needs new rules.
This is the kinda thing corps get fined billions of dollars for.
They won't be any kind of "arbiter of truth" if they just decide to refuse to carry all political ads, like Twitter has decided to do.
I think that it's quite possible that a total laissez faire attitude towards quantity of paid speech may be incompatible with democracy, in the context of disinformation campaigns and massive wealth inequality, etc. Free speech without democracy is pointless. These issues may require some adjustment to our social contracts.
However, political ads aren’t usually just any kind of ad; They are almost always using scare tactics, or sometimes, just flat out lying. Stuff that would be illegal for a regular ad to do can sometimes be done simply because it’s a political ad.
Besides, who’s going to enforce the accuracy of the ads? We’ve seen many times that the government cannot hold itself accountable, so why would they do it for political ads.
I clearly said no such thing. I merely pointed out that 1) Facebook can respond to these problems without doing any (private) viewpoint censorship and 2) we as a society may need to adjust the parameters around paid speech to protect democracy. Most things aren't black and white, and the choice isn't a binary one between extremes like laissez faire and total bans.
1) people notice someone has gotten power
2) people notice the person is being shitty about it
3) people insist that responsibility and power go hand in hand
4) person does not rise to the challenge
5) people take the power away
Making them accountable is the warning shot. Next step is divestiture.
The question is will they percolate to the top of the priority list? Small time offenders often get away with it.
[edit:] if you ask me, which you kinda did, I think we're using a self-organizing system, where people self-select into active positions in society and then we cull the worst actors - if we can - before they get too powerful. We get enough pleasant surprises out of this arrangement that we tolerate the bad ones. Trying to plan this stuff out ahead of time? You get a boring dystopia or a scary dystopia.
Regulating and/or breaking up Facebook is hardly "demanding they become the final arbiter of truth." The goal here is reducing Mark Zuckerberg to the point where his personal judgement is irrelevant.
That's not even remotely the same.
[0]: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...
It doesn't matter what the outcome is of the 2020 election season, or what Facebook does during it. They will be blamed for it.
Buying Instagram and Whatsapp was farsighted, Facebook the company can cruise for awhile on those properties. The main site is bound to fall out of fashion, and soon.
Can't be soon enough for my taste.
To be honest I think it's pretty terrible as a group platform. No proper discussion threads and it's hard to find stuff. But people don't have to pay to host a website/forum and there's virtually no barrier to join since most people have an account on facebook.com.
The only reason I still use facebook is for these groups.
As you said the irony is that it is worse in almost every way except sign up friction. The content isn't even being spidered in any way by Google or the like so discovering the content in these groups later is also nigh impossible.
Just a travesty.
This is huge too. It's so hard to archive the data on these closed platforms - especially if you need an account ot view the data. There's a massive loss of knowledge when these platforms inevitably shutter.
Uhhh, that already happened many years ago. Talk to anyone under 30, and Facebook is VERY out of style/out-of-date. They will most likely laugh at you or think you're being ironic if you were to bring up "hanging out on Facebook" or anything like that.
As of July 2019, 13 - 24 year olds make up 31.9% of Facebook's overall userbase. Another 32% make up the 25-34 age range.
Compare that to some of the other platform's 13-24 demographic:
Twitter 39%, Instagram 37.3%, Snap Chat 58.5%
While Snapchat has a slightly younger audience, they also only have 210 million active users, a 13% increase from previous year. Facebook on the other hand has 2.45 billion active users, a 9% increase from previous year.
And at that, there are still many people in the US who mainly use Facebook, especially Gen X and older, so I always question if there are as many people on this train as it often seems like.
As for "Gen X and older", when your youngest customers are pushing 40, that's the kiss of death.
I agree with all sibling comments that claim that Facebook is already out of fashion; I'm suggesting that this will get worse, rapidly.
Suggesting? Ok, hoping.
Sadly this isn't true at all. They've been posting record profits and growth all year. Just yesterday they posted their third quarter results, where their sales rose 29% and user base increased by 35 million, including by 3 million in North America [0], despite negative news surrounding them all year. Most people simply don't care, or care enough to actually delete their accounts over these things.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-30/facebook-...
Zuck's a smart guy, and there are other smart people working there; I'm sure they realize this, but they can't actually say it to the AOCs of the world for fear of freaking out shareholders and advertisers.
Mark Zuckerburg saw it and thought, we now have a monopoly on social media based political advertising! $$$
Sounds a little dystopian and authoritarian to me as well. Fair democracy is hard.
That's not true for Facebook or any other advertising platform. These platforms have entire sets of policies on what ads they will or will not run. Some restrictions are legally mandated, while others are based their own internal standards (i.e. they won't run blatantly racist ads even though they aren't technically illegal).
The decision to run political ads regardless of whether they contain lies is a specific choice they are making, not something that emerges from a universal principle of access to paid advertising.
And it's Mr. Zuckerberg's right to choose that route, as CEO of his company. But it doesn't absolve him of criticism for making the decision the way he did, whether from Mr. Dorsey, or a random nobody on this forum.
This rule means I could go form a PAC and post a ridiculous ad like “Voting for Biden will give you AIDS.” That has no basis in reality, yet from Zuckerberg’s words, it sounds like they would allow it.
Every political movement in history has consisted of forming groups, contacting potential allies, soliciting donations from them, then spending that money on pamphlets, TV, radio ads, etc. That's freedom at work. The medium has now shifted away from pamphlets, TV, and radio, towards the Internet and social media.
If paid advertisements are not free speech, then the concept of free speech would cease to exist beyond street corner rants.
I think the main reason they want sponsored content is, well, it pays their salaries and fuels the stock’s valuation.
translation: I simply cannot say no to the amount of money made from political ads
So if Facebook cared more about free speech than increasing profits, they'd go back to the older model where someone with no money, but plenty of time to volunteer, could build a sizeable audience.
It's not bad to want a good return on your investment, but to couch that in a feel-good pitch for free speech just seems wrong.
But then you could also be running ads to push a public issue such as climate change independent of anyone's campaign.
How do you differentiate between the two?
So you can ban advertisements from political organizations, but if a third-party or the Russians start running misinformation ads on climate change and pro-life, the media won't exactly recognize it as a "non political advertisement" and leave off.
In the election of 2016, most of the misinformation was not directly initiated by the political candidates. Your suggestion wouldn't affect any of the misinformation spread in 2016.
Canada, Ireland, and the UK all do this with Party Political Broadcasts:
I'm all for the actions of twitter in this case but it really should be mandated by law.
Should Adult (xxx) sites be held accountable for ads for male enlargement pills/snake oils? I personally don't think so. Is the answer to this problem to teach our population that blindly accepting what you read is safe (you can trust information posted on social media/public internet sites as fact) OR do we instead teach our citizens to filter information analytically and do research the way you are taught to in university for example?
Personally I think the former option is an intractable problem. Why try to make it safe for your population NOT to have to think instead of just teaching them how to think critically?
Hmmm...a question like that is essentially opening up the gates for speculation - the kind of speculation that may not paint the government (the body that seems to be pushing for, as you say, "trustworthy information") in the most benevolent light.
I agree with the essence of what you're getting at - it's the old biblical trope of giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish. But I could think of many possible benefits (for a government) in having a population with a reduced ability or incentive to be analytical and think critically. To be fair, I can think of many possible costs as well - I don't know whether one would outweigh the other.
Well, Mr. Zuckerberg; I don't think this explains, let alone justifies your policy of allowing outright lies in political ads without any pushback.
Whenever you think this company cannot sink any lower you're always in for a massive surprise and disappointment.
I define full transparency as providing a full, near-real-time, public record of EVERY advert run, including (but not limited to): who paid for it & in what currency, all targeting parameters, and count of views.
This would allow any person, public interest group, competitor, or other interested party to be informed and respond as they saw appropriate.
This would also make FB adverts more like major media adverts, where anyone can (with a little bit of work) see exactly who is running what for & against their position.
As FB is currently opaque, it is a magnet for manipulators seeking the holy grail of adverts, micro-targeted at the exact people who will respond, highly effective at changing behavior, and completely unnoticed by the opposition. FB may see this as attracting revenue, but the transparent option described above will likely generate more with the likely cycles of responses to adverts, counter-responses, etc.
False claims, wholly misleading edits? Fine, just as long as everyone can see who's spreading that crap, and to whom, and can respond.
I have no idea if Facebook already does any of this, but from their policy about fact checking, they do not require any political ads to go through their third party fact-check. Otherwise the third-party fact checker appears to do all the research themselves or they may reach out to the advertisers for more information.
https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/182222309230722?ref=...
1 - If you take away FB advertising, then you reduce political upward mobility of many lesser known candidates.
2 - FOX, CNN, MSNBC and others will have an unfair advantage to promote an insider candidate or a candidate the bosses at these networks want to help promote.
If you're okay with the above outcome, then push to end FB advertising. I can tell you from the inside, FB is tremendously important in giving smaller and lesser candidates a fighting chance against those backed by big money, establishment and insiders.
I'm even curious if AOC herself would have been able to prevail without FB advertising.
Even something small as promoting an event like a town hall, greatly benefits the smaller candidates, IMO.
As for twitter advertising, it wasn't helpful for us and it only constitutes a small fraction of "digital". If you look at the campaign spending data across you'll see a similar trend. So it's an easier decision for twitter.
It feels like a false dichotomy, especially when freedom of speech is invoked.
We don't talk about freedom of speech for drug companies when we require a side effects disclaimer at the end of a pharmacutical ad - it feels disingenuous to me to talk about it here too when we should be talking about enforcing the FEC's attribution guidelines.
The government elite, of course, see through these shenanigans and are just out to protect people from voting wrongly.
I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook has already done this.
• Require all advertisements to be published N days in advance on a public noticeboard with full details of every aspect of the advertisement—audience, budget, funding entity.
• Do not allow targeting in any political advertising other than to narrow adverts to the geography of the candidate or issue—e.g. ads for a congressperson to their congressional district.
• Require the business unit handling political advertising to have strict isolation from the rest of the company. Maybe require it to be an independent entity.
If we seriously need to fix this then it should be enforced by a law which applies to every media/news organization.
Luckily Twitter didn't follow the reasoning that as long as it's not illegal, it's OK.
Fundraising becomes slightly less important if you can't spend the money online. Not sure of the overall effect, as TV providers are unlikely to turn away the lucrative ad spend.
I'd like to have an ISO9001 traceable, encrypted log of all the ads shown to me. Every pixel that was placed on a screen meant to change my mind. And it should be traceable all the way back to the mine the ore was dug from.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
As long as there is such informational overload, there is no escaping from having algorithms sort things for you
Blurting out, “so you’re a whore then” in a staff meeting? Not okay. So I just stared.
If I could stand to look at Zuck I’d be staring right now.
Their response: I'm glad to hear we're <doing it for money> and not <giving it away for free>.
(Using words beginning with 'W' and 'S' respectively for each concept.)
I was referred for a CtH position at a small company years ago where they turned out to be, to quote the old CIA line, looking for a certain moral flexibility. I declined to convert, and I also don't accept referrals from that person anymore.
I was not at all surprised to see a couple of those people end up at an online gambling company in my neighborhood a few years later. And relieved they didn't seem to recognize me.
I keep hearing there are people who went into CS entirely for the money. I have deluded myself that I hadn't met many of them. But you encounter a bunch of them in one place and it's pretty hard to ignore.
But the thing is that the whole premise of free speech is the belief that sunlight is best disinfectant for bad ideas. We have this belief (whether warranted or not, though I'd argue it is) that _utlimately_ we will arrive at the good ideas and reject the bad ideas through public discourse. In other words, we have faith, from a holistic standpoint, that the polity will decide issues based on the substance of the ideas presented to them in the political arena (I understand well that this isn't the case in specific instances nor in every period of time, but it's still the belief broadly speaking). That being the case, increased reach - where reach simply = number of eyeballs you shove your message in front of - doesn't mean anything per se. The people who participate in the democratic process and public discourse still must sift through the ideas to determine which are good and which are bad.
Maybe the counterargument to my point is "well, yes, we do believe that ideas are ultimately what win out, but if the candidates with less money cannot reach an audience, then you never get to a debate in the first place."
I guess I do hear that argument and I'm unsure.
I think where this gets complicated is when you start to think not just in terms of hard cash and spending on political ads. What about when media outlets and other organizations are dedicated, for whatever reason, to a certain candidate. For example, when TYT clearly favors a candidate and spends an entire election season praising them, etc - should that be allowed? In some ways those are resources being used as well to increase the reach of a candidate. It's time, money, staff, resources, etc. It seems to me that it just gets very dicey when you look at things just in terms of cash. You end up having to effectively try to centralize the whole process and make sure that everyone's reach is exactly even, which just isn't possible without massive government intervention and coercion and flagrant violations of free speech. I just don't see how this works out well in the end.
I strongly recommend Jill Gordon's paper "John Stuart Mill and the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" (1997), which explores Mill's views and the history of their use, in depth:
https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1...
(Paywalled, though available via Sci-Hub / Library Genesis.)
Now, apparently, many are convinced it is wrong to have any barriers to lying.
The con men have certainly gotten the upper hand. I suppose if we fall for this obvious and absurd BS we deserve the world we get (collectively).
I don't know why we expect any company to self regulate when an action hurts its interests.
Since FB tends to be a self-reinforcing echo chamber on both ends of the political spectrum, political ads will keep users engaged with the platform. For a variety of reasons interest in the 2020 campaign is likely to be sky high so allowing the ads should keeps FB's DAU's & MAU's in the preferred direction. Not allowing the ads could in-turn adversely affect those metrics and subsequently pull down ALL of their advertising rates. Freedom of Speech rational of allowing adds? (scoff, scoff, snort, outburst of laughter.....)
Slight tangent: Regulation is a thing because businesses have been shown to not self regulate when its in their best interest not to. A corporation maximizing profits could be a good thing for consumers, but it could also be bad. And when it’s bad, that’s when regulation is supposed to come in.
> This week, another critic emerged: Adriel Hampton, a marketer and progressive activist in San Francisco, who on Monday announced his intention to run for governor of California in protest of the policy, posting fake ads to prove his point.
> Facebook has since said that it won’t allow Mr. Hampton to take advantage of its lax approach to political speech despite his candidacy, and he says he is exploring his legal options.
The rules are enforced if and when they want to, completely arbitrarily.
If money is speech, only the rich are heard!
You don't dig in your heels because that attracts the media attention, like a shark to a drop of blood. You say "This is something we're going to look at and evaluate closely." And then wait until the news gets bored of it. And then quietly release that you won't because of several reasons.
This is even more the case for narrowly targeted, and particularly negative / dissuading advertising. A chief tool and complaint in recent years has been of suppressing voter turnout, at times through issue advertising, but also specifically by spreading disinformation about candidates, voting processes, locations, times, and requirements.
Simply disabling advertising for a narrow range of users capable and motivated to block ads does not protect against the social consequences of such activities.
That's from someone who's not a free-speech absolutist.
The inciting incident that gave rise to the concerns is simply that Trump won. Only a tiny fraction of the reach that Trump obtained via FB and Twitter was paid advertising.
Most of the reach that benefitted Trump was simply the algorithm amplifying journalistic stories (mostly negative) that allowed Trump to dog whistle effectively.
Imagine someone with 800 FB friends who shares an article from, the NYT or Huffpost that is harshly critical of Trump for saying something that comes across as racist. There are three broad categories to characterize those who see the shared content:
a) people who are in the target audience of the article, who dislike Trump, who expected him to be racist, and who consider the article further proof (and vindication) of their view
b) people who read the coverage and find it unfair to Trump, even if they agree with the gist.
c) people who actually agree with the racist view Trump is alleged to have expressed.
If the user sharing the article has 800 friends, most are probably in group a, but Trump benefits from any friends the user has who are in groups b or c. To them, the article reinforces their support for Trump or their view that the coverage was unfair.
For those who view the coverage as unfair, a steady stream of similarly unfair-seeming articles makes them effectively immune to negative press about Trump. In 2019 many of Trump's supporters are in this group. When Trump describes "fake news" he is appealing to this group. The reach that benefits Trump may be 100 of the 800 friends, and it cost Trump's campaign nothing. Trump triggered these kinds of signaling cascades many, many times during the 2016 campaign.
Sadly, the biggest problem is reporting that is not journalism but in-group focused entertainment writing. Many of the "most shared" articles from major papers are not thorough, in-depth stories, they are light on journalism and heavy on in-group signaling. It is this kind of article that helps Trump the most, for the aforementioned reasons.
These are also the kinds of articles that get the most clicks and generate the most revenue for the paper.
-- Bob Dylan
I’ve always felt nervous about the role of money in politics and removing the requirement for massive ad-spend budgets might bring us closer to a more moral democracy, and away from pay-to-play.
Easy at least when the message is “don’t vote for Bob!”, than when it is “we don’t see any harm in GMO wheat”. Unattributed attack ads are pretty obvious but it’s harder to tie issue ads to the party they benefit.