Ban non-geographically targeted political ads. Create a public repository of all political ads.
Creating a puppet entity and calling it a court is dishonest and insulting.
(The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Concentrated market power is the fundamental problem.)
This actually sounds like a good idea. Ads about issues pertaining a whole region should be seen by the whole region.
> Create a public repository of all political ads.
Doesn't this exist already? https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
> The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Not saying this wouldn't be good, but how would this help with the whole content moderation debacle? It looks to me like Twitter, YouTube, etc has the same issue. This specific problem doesn't sound like something that would be magically fixed if there was more competition, though I might be wrong.
They also are broadly broadcast so that they can be dis-proven and discussed. Instead they are hidden away only shown to people that won't question it.
If facebook wants to do political ads then it needs to disconnect them from targeting, publish them for public display, publish who paid for the ad, and moderate them to some basic level of being truthful.
They may not "micro-target", but they can definitely target them.
Any political campaign will tell you they do their damnedest to ensure their ads are running at the right times on the right TV/radio stations.
Honestly, hours of traditional media itself (Fox, MSNBC) likely does far more to bias opinion than handfuls of 30-second ads.
It should, but only because it's incredibly annoying.
Fair point. I suppose targeting could be balanced against a public cool-down period.
So you can randomly target people in the district now. Or, make your targeted ad publicly available for N days before it goes out. This would let the public see it, check it, and potentially respond before the damage is done.
No censorship. Just a head start for the public if a campaign wants to target.
I feel like you are inadvertedly misrepresenting OP's point. The OP specifically referred to geographically targeted ads, which have already a long history of being manipulated to subvert the Democratic process by foreign actors with disastrous consequences, and instead you somehow are talking about "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising"?
It might not have been your intention but your post sounds like a disingenuous strawman.
Yes, and you've made a gross misrepresentation by equating it wi "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising." It's a very disingenuous take on what was actually said.
> Besides, the “long history of being manipulated ... with disastrous consequences” is a [citation needed] assertion.
Really? In this day and age are you still trying to turn a blind eye to the elections in the US and the UK?
> Certainly, the thin support for that position doesn’t overcome the fact that it makes total sense to allow targeting ads by geography.
You're again coming off as very disingenuous by misrepresenting what was actually said, as the OP specifically talked about non-geographically targeted ads and you in turn decided to talk about the exact opposite.
Put another way: how can we determine actual harm caused, and be sure that it isn't blown out of proportion? (IE Cambridge Analytica playing up their capabilities to get new customers)
Moderation policy is an axis of competition. Letting each platform explore moderation systems (a) let’s us compare results, (b) reduces the damage a single company’s bad policies can inflict, (c) and gives users on both sides alternatives if they disagree.
Look through my posts in this thread. FB causes shitstorms of damage not the least of which is aggregation / indoctrination of dissention through isolation.
FB is basically pushing monsters outside of its gates in hopes they "go away". They wont. lol.
Also there are legal practices call "punitive damages" so yes there exists legal statutes for punishing things that we determine we dont like.
If you do what Twitter is now doing[1], "restrict rather than outright ban", you're back to having to serve as an arbiter.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20966897/twitter-politic...
My comment suggests no such banning. The ads simply couldn't be micro-targeted. They'd also need to be made public, so the public, journalists and other interest groups could review, vet and respond to them.
If you live in the US, or Europe, or pretty much any country Facebook operates in, the company is spending millions of dollars every year to lobby your government. While that may not sound like a lot, political influence is surprisingly cheap, and effects you whether or not you choose to participate in the political process. The CEO meets regularly with the president of the United States and his close associates, and has met and spoken with many other world leaders.
Facebook is a major facilitator of violence and ethnic cleansing around the world (https://time.com/5197039/un-facebook-myanmar-rohingya-violen..., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-content/fa..., https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/chinse-media-fa...). You might argue that if they couldn't use Facebook, people would just use some other platform or tool to accomplish the same goal. That's possible, but if it's happening on Facebook, the company has a responsibility to take action, and they have failed. I don't think there is any other platform that could be used as effectively as Facebook and WhatsApp for this purpose.
Even if you don't use Facebook, they likely have a profile for you if anybody you know uses it. They collect contacts from peoples' phones, and scan for faces in all photographs (and correlate the results with other photos). If you don't have robust ad and tracker blocking in your web browser, Facebook is tracking your behavior with their ubiquitous like buttons and analytics scripts.
Because they are a dragnet of private information that is used specifically against your best interests, both private and public.
You're policing speech. It hasn't historically worked well.
Personally, I'd rather just see Facebook stop being such a huge force in the market and instead move toward a decentralized model like Mastodon with ActivityPub, but there's no way Facebook is going to go that voluntarily, nor is there any reason that they should.
So, at the very least, they could make this organization completely outside of Facebook's oversight, kind of like how the ESRB works. Maybe this is their end goal, idk, but if they choose to retain control, people are always going to be skeptical.
1) I listened to Zuckerburgs podcast on free speech. I felt that while it had the appearance of adhering to the principles of the first amendment I think the purpose of the podcast and the reasoning of its participants is that the first amendment in facebooks eyes shouldn’t be the only consideration.
For me personally, I am close to what con law people call absolutist. The first amendment means what it says. However the first amendment says nothing about tv, radio and the internet (for obvious reasons). That’s where I am willing to extend my definition to be first amendment + Supreme Court precedent. This is the standard I view as the gold standard of individual liberty. I stopped using Facebook last January as an experiment / New Years resolution to focus my time more effectively but I would say after hearing the podcast, intellectual and well meaning as it was, the positions presented are completely incompatible with my view of individual liberty. I may decide this new year to simply deactivate my account altogether for this reason.
2) there is a growing trend of companies acting like governments. For ex, look at the surveillance powers created by nest/amazon. Look at the efforts to use private satellites for sub 1m resolution surveillance (formerly the only application was defense/intelligence related). And now look at Facebook and Twitter deciding on new rules for speech/content. Facebook’s Supreme Court is a way to manage the complex arguments for going beyond our own legal system. It is borne, in my opinion, both as an means to enact rules to curb individual liberty but also to subvert the existing expensive and lengthy process of taking something to the Supreme Court. And that’s just in the US ... never mind countries that don’t have the legal infrastructure to decide these issues.
In short, this is Facebook deciding it can hack / disrupt government. There’s no coincidence this is happening at the same time that it is introducing libra.
I am not a citizen of Facebook. I’m less than a citizen. I’m simply a physical embodiment of a life whose digital representation is owned and marketed by a private company. And now it wants to govern my digital representation’s speech and money. And I don’t single out Facebook. How long before I can subscribe to a private Nest police force?
Government is slow. Government is inefficient. Government is corrupt. As far as I’m concerned governments sole purpose is to protect my individual liberty. What is facebooks sole purpose?
How effective is that? Doesn't Facebook collects data on everyone's online behavior even if they don't have an account?
In theory, Facebook could figure out a way to have truly independent panel of experts than are non-partisan and aren't beholden to Facebook in any way, but I have no idea how they could do it in practice, and even if they did, it'd backfire on them very quickly as soon as that panel would make a decision that some activist group wouldn't like, as those activists would surely target Facebook and Facebook would have a choice to either annihilate the credibility of the panel by ignoring its decision or face the wrath of activists which the Facebook have proven many times in the past they can't withstand and will have to cave anyway.
So I really don't see any positive outcome here. Once you're in the censorship game, you're in the censorship game, with all that involves.
Some of the people replying to you are a bit...ich, but:
Why not give the funds to someone battle-tested and with a good reputation like John Gilmore to distribute for the purpose? Something can't be independent with as much Facebook control over it as the post implies.
As it stands, there is zero evidence of this. If Zuck is displeased with it, then he can just not contribute more once the initial money is used.
Also, I would really like to just see my activity feed from all my followed friends in straight up chronological order, with no filtering, dang it.
The way you all display stuff right now is obviously designed so you can sprinkle ads into the feed as if they were actual content. But I don't want to see ads. At all. Period.
Near as I can tell, the mainstream media has spent years telling conservatives that their voices are being silenced at a disproportionate rate by left-leaning Facebook employees. At the same time, they're telling liberals that Facebook is deliberately allowing the spread of disinformation to help more conservatives get elected. Almost as though someone wants the left and right united in their hated of social media.
The next step is obvious: pass laws to cripple the major social media companies and restore the mainstream media to its former position of unchallenged power.
Yes, quit attempting to police speech.
DRM on digital books, "renting" books on digital platforms, banned books by governments, banned books on shopping sites, religions sentencing and/or cursing the "unclean" reader, communists banning religious books....
Maybe this is something that you (=FB) should have given some thought before navigating yourself into that situation. Finding a solution for this is hardly anything that outsiders should have to do. Solve the mess yourself and better do it fast.
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If people get harangued for showing up and mentioning their employer, that will only disincentivize them and others to participate on topics they know a lot about. That will make HN strictly worse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
I know there is a tendency to be consumed with your own importance combined with political heat, but the best course is to develop great filtering tools for users and “Let the people decide.”
If it was only Facebook, FB would accept any ad as long as someone is willing to pay to display it.
Stop policing speech/thoughts/ideas/communication.
Nobody has asked facebook to be the arbiter of social-morality.
You at facebook are creating an echo chamber and driving dissenting voices away because they dont adhere to the 'woke' dogma.
You're taking all the monstrous ideas and pushing them outside. You're giving them no option but to aggregate + further radicalize each other.
This is why shit like 8chan has gotten so wretched.
Theres already WAY too much involvement + dogmatic oversight of 'moral right' by facebook.
Stop doing what you're doing and accept that if you're ACTUALLY interested in the mass-culture integration you claim you're working towards, banning + policing thoughts aren't the way towards that ends.
What actually needs to happen is for the bad to be extrema to be buffered though interaction w the socially normal beliefs.
What facebook is CURRENTLY doing is radicalizing groups.
Somehow zuck cant see this as the repressive puritanical system that it is.
Actually, I believe @unearthed acknowledged a problem, and asserted the best solution was to do nothing.
Because FBs take is so uninformed, its going to create greater social rifts.
LITERALLY contra to what its stated objectives are.
SO. WHY would zuck do this?
lip service to his employees.
Incorrect. Im saying the solution IS NOT the dogmatic oversight that facebook is pursuing here.
Instead the solution is: "The droves of people using facebook are sufficiently large that an organic zeitgeist can emerge without interference"
Surely You're NOT suggesting:
"Yes we require the dogmatic, bureaucratic, oversight of speech to create harmony"
This is an open, legitimate debate. It's complicated with Facebook due to its lack of competition.
Companies moderating speech on their services is time tested and likely necessary. If the market presents a diversity of services, no one system of moderation gets a stranglehold on public discourse.
Facebook, however, is dominant. As a result, its decisions approach the breadth of government censorship. That's a fundamental disconnect they're trying to paper over.
Twitter, Reddit, Snapshat, Marco Polo...lots of competition in the social media space.
Is there a successful FB clone, a la Google+? No there is not. That does not mean FB somehow owns social media.
Not at FBs scale
Here's the thought experiment validating what Im claiming about driving out dissenting views:
Where do the ideas that are pushed out of facebook go?
Do you think they just go away? Absolutely not.
The problems is zuck is culturally beholden to his droves of socially 'woke' employees. Nor does Zuck strike anyone asa persona strong enough to do anything other than 'tow the line' of that narrative.
Socially, hes a lap-dog.
Which is why this 'Supreme Court' is being established. Homeboy cant shoulder the weight (in the court of public-opinion) of the moral judgements being made, so hes throwing $130 million so someone else's name sits at the top of that list.
IMO the only thing this is doing is creating monsters + pushing the work of social integration down the line. Its a bad short-term strategy.
Atop the list of problems here is that facebook loses oversight/engagement w the most dangerous of outside thought-leaders. Inadvertently, putting themselves in the dark.
The argument is that we have more violent extremists, not less, and they've been quite successful in using large public platforms to recruit and radicalize new members. The "organic zeitgeist" has had plenty of time to do its thing, and it really hasn't.
You're offering a straw man argument, by way of false dichotomy: kafkaesque hellscape vs total freedom happyland. It's not helpful to the conversation, imo, and doesn't actually engage with the issues at hand. It's polemics, not a solution.
2) You cite nothing substantiating these claims.
Leave it to a woke phd to misrepresent a claim to win an argument.
> total freedom happyland
No you dumb fuck.
Im saying that the process of people sorting out a collective, integrated social morality is going to be complex.
Where the fuck did I say it was going to be easy?
> kafkaesque
Yes, its a big deal. How long do you think the british people are going to put up with their daughters being raped and people being stabbed? Do you think that "acceptance" for Khans woke bullshit will continue into perpetuity? Do you think there's some really mean fucking people who are basting in anger + isolation because they've been pushing out of pleasant society?
Does such a thought seem plausible at all? What do you think happens before a coup of any kind? Someone capable sits it isolation + gets really fucking pissed off.
This is the problem with having discussions with arm-chain intellectuals in a space where they can behave with impunity.
You're happy to attempt to win an argument by misrepresenting my claims. The intelligencia of the bay area is absolutely reprehensible -- and I know, I live here with this bullshit.
Fuck, would I love to have these discussions face to face.
> kafkaesque
Lets sit down and get a coffee and chat over this shit and well see which of us is more capably evil.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
This is critical advice for a lot of topics.