Facebook is running anti-vax ads, despite its ban on vaccine misinformation | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is running anti-vax ads, despite its ban on vaccine misinformation

buzzfeednews.com

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This, along with political ads, is a pretty amazingly good example of how facebook was wrong - they can't deliver advertising to customers at higher efficacy and lower cost than traditional media... what they can do is fail to properly vet ads for cheaper than traditional media spends vetting ads.

I feel like this problem should start the sounding of warning bells around the efficiencies tech companies create. A lot of good value is created in tech, but along with that value is the movement to accomplish a solution for most of the problem for far less of a cost. If you can managed to eschew portions of your product that are unimportant (creating a DB tuned to reading that does reading really well and slows way down during writes) then you might have the beginnings of a great business, but the portions of the feature set you're eschewing need to actually be optional. Building a peer to peer trading website without building in support for all those onerous requirements around preventing human trafficking and other black market dealings isn't a solid business - the government will shut you down and your product isn't groundbreaking and paradigm shifting - it's half-assed.

I reeeeally strongly suspect that a lot of web advertisers are feeling the pain now that HUD has started watching web advertisements for housing discrimination, now that the impact of politcal ads is becoming accepted and now that slimy businesses are exploiting FUD to push homeopathy... Preventing these has always been a requirement in the field of marketing, and your business isn't disruptive and edgy because it ignores them - it's living on borrowed time until a huge lawsuit drives it out of business.

Just because they fail to properly vet ads for cheaper than traditional media doesn't mean they can't still deliver advertising to customers at higher efficacy and lower cost than traditional media.

The cost just might not be as low as they had hoped.

I'd like to see some tech innovation around peer to peer governance and enforcement of rules. Government is going to struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of advertising on the web. Asking a central authority to police all of it is not a recipe for success. Can we incentivize consumers to enforce ad regulations in a meaningful way? That might lead to a better advertising world for all of us.

Why are they allowed to profit from spreading misinformation without consequence?

On the flip side, do you want Facebook or any company to control what you can or can not say?

I mean, it'd be best if the government did this and was held accountable in terms of censorship in all the normal ways they are - but Facebook decided to adopt the responsibility to be the one who needs to control it... so they made their own bed.

I think this is a more complex issue than some make it out to be.

That said, if you walk into a restaurant and start yelling about something, they can absolutely kick you out, because it's a private company, not the government.

Do I want regulations that would prevent things that are illegal to say on one media form to apply to all? Sure. You can't just go buy a TV ad that says "blue cars cause cancer", knowing that it will drive business away from a guy you hate that makes blue cars. But I can go have that facebook ad up in 5 minutes.

As part of living in a society, I am happy to cede some freedoms for a better world.

FTC is supposed to enforce truth-in-advertising laws regardless of the medium (television or online).

They already do. These are advertisements and Facebook accepts money and approves them explicitly (and limits what advertisers can say/do already).

Random FB post - yeah maybe theres a 1st amendment argument there - but ads are already "Facebook authorized speech"

Limitations on corporate liability and America's approach to company registrations means that often times companies openly profiting from misinformation are torn down - then the owners register a new one and keep on keeping on - if their actions can be proven to cause real harm the owners may be prosecuted but this is a rare occurrence and not enough to discourage people from trying to profit from it apparently.

What are the incentives or driving force behind anti-vaxxers? I am amazed why someone is putting money and efforts on anti-vaccination. Personally its hard to believe it become a big thing without some sort incentives/driving force.

A lot of people have fallen into the FUD wholesale and are resolute believers so it might be mostly driven by momentum at this point - but somewhere under all of that is a slimy snake-oil salesman who is raking in the money for sugar water... traditional medicine and such never take off unless someone can make a buck.

Here you go: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2019/10/15/fdc...

I feel like Companies like Goop and other "natural" health companies profit from this stuff as a side-effect. Like who else could you market this type of crap to.

https://shop.goop.com/shop/products/rose-quartz-bottle?taxon...

Ironically, I've seen a lot of people (including firsthand) who consider things like Goop to be "liberal" nonsense, yet consider vaccines dangerous because of the conspiracy/general-distrust-of-experts angles.

As the article states, these anti-vax pamphlets suggest parents buy the advertisers natural remedy products instead.

Relevant information:

>"Facebook does not have a policy that bans advertising on the basis that it expresses opposition to vaccines," a Facebook spokesperson said. "Our policy is to ban ads containing vaccine misinformation."

The ad Buzzfeed thinks is in violation:

>One ad reads, “Is the vaccine the best option? And if not, what is?” Another says, “Click below for a FREE guide for Pertussis which will include: Vaccine Controversy.”

Seems pretty cut and dry to me. The ad doesn't contain misinformation, merely opposition. Somehow I can't help but feel like we're sliding down the slippery slope though.

The site the ad links to contains the misinformation. It seems like that conforms with FB policy.

> The ad doesn't contain misinformation, merely opposition.

Can you show me a formulation of "vaccine opposition" that does not require misinformation to be credible?

Sure: there's the idea of opposing vaccines because you want the absolute option of bodily autonomy over what gets injected into your bloodstream.

The thing about you deciding what goes into you is that it is harming other people. Your rights stop once you harm others.

That wasn't the point I was making, please don't strawman me. The GP asked for an argument against vaccination that didn't rely on misinformation.

Seriously. The use of the term "opposition" here makes it sound like vaccinations are things people can have subjective opinions about. It's like having a dissenting opinion on 1+1=2 or voicing ones opposition to the sky being being blue and expecting everyone to be cool with that. Except in the case of vaccinations, these dissenters cause people to freaking die, and not just themselves or their own. And their argument is literally never anything more than, "well, y'know, some people are saying vaccinations are bad, I hear. Some of them are even in my family or on TV or go to my church so there must be something to it!"

The ad's destination URL contains the misinformation.

Agencies play this semantic cat and mouse game with policies that are clearly targeted at preventing this type of content from proliferating, so it's not as cut and dry as you believe it is.

The larger picture may not be cut and dry, but this example is. The wording of the policy is very clear, and so is the wording of the ads in question.

No, it's not. An ad's destination page is subject to Facebooks advertising policy:

>During the ad review process, we'll check your ad's images, text, targeting, and positioning, in addition to the content on your ad's landing page. Your ad may not be approved if the landing page content isn't fully functional, doesn't match the product/service promoted in your ad or doesn't fully comply with our Advertising Policies.

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

Huh, I didn't know that strictly the same policies applied to both the ad content and the ad destination.

What's your explanation for Facebook leaving up the ad and issuing the statement that they did then? It appears they are standing by their choice on some grounds, and I'm curious what your interpretation of that is.

> Our policy is to ban ads containing vaccine misinformation

Well, ok, so the only ads they ban are ads that say "Vaccines cause autism!". How useful is that as a policy? By the same metric a "Find out the truth about the moon landing!" would contain no false information about the moon landing even though the link is chalk full of it.

Has anyone ever seen or produced an ad that actually runs afoul of this policy? If not, it is a useless policy, they are still aiding the spread of misinformation on a very important health topic.

Facebook does this so often (lip service with no real practical effects) that we can't consider it to be helplessness anymore. A company so routinely ineffective at fixing its mistakes must be lying about actually believing they were mistakes.

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