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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

The fact that I don't trust Google (or any other large corporation, for that matter) to judge what is and is not an "obvious lie" given the right political incentives. In this case, outright banning would be better and remove any ambiguity or opportunity for shenanigans.

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Not that an outright ban is a good solution either, as there is a large discussion to have about what is and isn't political. Some people see some topics as inherently political, while others would say that they have nothing to do with politics.

So deciding what is and isn't banned becomes an inherently political statement.

This makes the definition of "politics" meaningless. Besides, it's a lot easier to nail down an objective definition (at least for Google's purposes) of what falls under a specific subject (ads are sold on keywords) than it is to nail down an objective definition of "truth".

You can exclude ads that mention or are paid for by any PAC, candidate for public office, or are advocating for or against any particular public policy decision, or mention the topic of elections or voting.

This would eliminate the majority of them, leaving bad actors that don't care about Google's requirements anyways. Another option would be to simply make certain keywords unpurchaseable.

> nail down an objective definition of "truth"

Recognizing the truth or falsehood of a statement or series of statements can be complicated, but we're doomed as a species if an objective definition of truth stops us in our tracks.

When it comes to things in Google's wheelhouse, at least. Their entire advertising platform is based on categorizing ads and where they're supposed to display. This is an entirely different ball of wax than trying to determine if the text of an ad is true or false, and that's before we get into the "true but misleading in context" quagmire.

Besides, we have precedent here. Have a look at their policies surrounding what's allowed in health ads[1], they're pretty extensive, objective, and granular.

[1]: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/176031?hl=en

Thanks, there is some thought-provoking stuff there.

You shouldn't trust any large _institution_ to prevent "obvious lies" from spreading. Institutions are just collections of people, and there's barely a single one out there that's managed to completdly avoid the fact that people are, generally speaking, dishonest and dumb.

I trust The Economist newspaper and the Congressional Budget Office

You'd trust The Economist (or the CBO) to be the arbiter of what other people are allowed to say? That's what my comment says, not "trust any institution to avoid telling obvious lies" (that being said, I've read some pretty dishonest stuff in the Economist, despite generally being a fan).

>You'd trust The Economist (or the CBO) to be the arbiter of what other people are allowed to say?

They already do that with their own employees. They censor and control what statements they print to control for accuracy. Journalism concerns in part determining what true statements we should print. I think the Economist and CBO do a good job of separating the facts from the fiction. I would trust them to fact-check statements. I would not trust CNN or Facebook or the Democrats to fact-check statements.

Ok, so then you have the problem of Google judging what is and is not political.

This is a good point that runs a little deeper than some people appreciate. (moving a topic into the category of "political" can already, today, be a subtle form of censorship in the public sphere)

At the same time, if we're talking about advertising, in the US we can just rely on what constitutes political advertising under the law.

I agree that would be an easy move for Google to make.

I would imagine that there would then be an incentive for potential donors to, rather then giving cash, pay for messages that fly under the radar but are designed to support a particular campaign.

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