Spotify Becomes Latest Tech Company to Hit Pause on Political Ads | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Becomes Latest Tech Company to Hit Pause on Political Ads

npr.org

Can't blame them. If I owned a software company I wouldn't touch politics with a mile long pole.

While I agree and think I generally approve of tech companies banning political ads, these bans are still not an apolitical move.

They're going to disproportionately affect underdog and non-incumbent candidates, as well as anyone who needs the voters purged in places like Georgia.

I think it will affect the incumbent the most. Trump used the impeachment fiasco to do record fundraising, and now he’s heading into 2020 with a massive war chest.

With major platforms banning political ads, they’re increasingly making that war chest less valuable.

I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to spend that money on traditional media.

It's all a big coincidence, the timing of this, affecting a party that's not popular among tech titans, no breach of ethics here at all. Everyone remembers the groundswell opposition from tech, to the Obama campaign's use of social media and targeted advertising, right? No?

Wait, was the media and tech sprawling with fawning reviews, declaring the Obama campaign a genius use of tech?

> increasingly making that war chest less valuable

Phone banking, knocking on doors, and (as someone else said) traditional media are all easy ways to spend money.

Trump needed cost-effective social media before, but now he won't be as reliant on it.

> Trump needed cost-effective social media before, but now he won't be as reliant on it.

Which is good. No more of Cambridge Analytica and following -

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-facebooks-embed-in-the-trum...

Is this even addressing the root cause of 2016 misinformation campaigning? I was assuming most misinformation was distributed as user-generated content, not ads.

How much was Spotify exploited as a media platform for campaign misinformation? Its cute that Spotify is doing this, but I think Facebook + Twitter were the big distribution channels (and probably Reddit is closest to the “astroturf core”).

Edit: grammar

Spotify is doing what they want to do for their platform. I’m not sure what you want Spotify to do about the user generated content on Facebook and Twitter.

Can't they just charge a lot more? Like $10million per ad?

It's a surcharge to avoid political ads, but hey Mr. Bloomberg, if you need to get attention... we will collect your money.

What would they do with this extra money? Fund open source foundations?

...wait... is $10Million too low? Is there that much money in politics?

This is how the system currently works. The best financed (so: most popular with business people) candidate gets heard the best and often times is pretty easily elected.

Remember when they praised the Obama campaign's efficient use of tech/social-media, including targeted advertising? Why do you think this new fangled opposition to political ad spend is timing itself right before the 2020 ramp up?

Hint: it's because tech Titans and their cronies can't tolerate an opposition campaign being just as good at tech/social-media targeting. Not because of some new found puritanical, ethical hate of politics

Remember MySpace? Music oriented social networking with no politics or invasive tracking. Good times.

The issue is that people are able to be targeted with surgical precision because of mass data collection. Banning political ads is just a half ass treatment of the effect.

And sociopath Zuck doesn’t even see the need to do that.

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