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Comment by okintheory | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that there's an obvious alternative to checking facts, but it's one that scares FB much more than fact checking. Suppose they were transparent! Suppose it was easy to see unobfuscated statistics about who is paying for what on FB. Suppose journalists could easily look up how much white nationalists are spending on targeted advertising in each US state. Suppose we could see how much Exxon, Chevron, Koch Industries are spending, or health insurance companies, or anyone else for that matter. Suppose we could also see how much engagement there is with each post from Breitbart, NYTimes, Young Turks and so on. If we had these facts, as Facebook does, we'd be off to a good start.

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Why just stop at Facebook? All businesses operate on the model where they take dirty money and try to do clean things with at least some of that money. Heck, most charities operate this way. Let's just make everyone transparent. We should know if the Red Cross is receiving money from Smith and Wesson. Bad individuals and corporations make donations to good causes all the time. You can think of it as moral outrage, but personally I think of it as reparations.

The consequences of that action will be as follows: Most of these businesses AND charities will drown in the moral outrage and close their doors. And that will have a detrimental impact on society, because the good that those businesses/charities did will go with the bad.

Facebook has one powerful good use case. It makes it trivially easy to connect with relatives and friends far away from us. There are other platforms out there, but until Facebook, there wasn't much, and even now, Facebook is the simplest and most convenient of them all. If Facebook dies, this good use case goes with it.

> All businesses operate on the model where they take dirty money and try to do clean things with at least some of that money.

That's a bit too cynical even for me. There do still exist businesses that simply produce a product or perform a service, selling it honestly without any tricks or subterfuge.

It's realistic and not cynical at all. Just the way life really is.

Try this thought experiment: The local mafia needs to eat, sleep, buy cars, equipment. Should local restaurants, grocery stores, rental complexes, dealerships, the local Home Depot, accept their patronage? Is that dirty money or clean money? Is Home Depot morally corrupt for selling lumber to the mafia boss for his new deck?

The answer to these and more is: no. Moral policing never works. We have laws and law enforcement to pursue criminals. It's their job, not Home Depot's.

Not all businesses pay tribute to or otherwise knowingly deal with local mafias. That's not realistic.

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/ has most of what you’re asking for I believe.

That's funny! Did you try it? I find it impossible to get any useful information out of it.

Literally the first ad that Facebook shows on my "newsfeed" is by "Jellop", but when I search for Jellop in their ad library, I get no results. In fact, I can't seem to get any results at all, regardless of what I search for, or what I select as the country.

Perhaps I misunderstood. The tool shows any ads on political and social issues, which should cover all the ads you mentioned (e.g. Exxon, Koch, insurance cos.), but won't cover Jellop ads.

That is a fair point! I did mainly mean to focus on social and political issues. I guess the question is what counts as transparent. In my mind, it should not be as easy as creating a new "page" to hide the connection between different sources.

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but my impression is that FB is aiming to provide just enough information that people will say "they're doing that already", and not enough that people can really understand what's going on. But I might be wrong.

The Ad Library claims to show all active ads, not just political/social ones. That's presumably true, but hard to verify or make use of. The "Jellop" ad that I couldn't find was missing precisely because the page name was something else they'd created for that ad.

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