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Reminds me of the time facebook made that (intentionally hard to use) database of "ads" to show that no manipulation was going on and then removed some clearly manipulative ads with the reasoning that they had not been marked as political ads and as such where not political but "just" illegal ads and shouldn't be in that database.

> The decision is part of its efforts to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. election.

Also surly Chinese, Russia and other propaganda actions will tell facebook that they are media outlets/state sponsored and not just lets say some company trying to sell some stuff.

> Also surly Chinese, Russia and other propaganda actions will tell facebook that they are media outlets/state sponsored and not just lets say some company trying to sell some stuff

Yes they have to, its clearly written in the conditions when you sign-up ;) uh and why not also the UAE? like just russia and china makes propaganda (hello trumpidumpi)

From Facebook's announcement:

We look at several factors that may indicate editorial control by a government, including:

- Mission statement, mandate, and/or public reporting on how the organization defines and accomplishes its journalistic mission

- Ownership structure such as information on owners, stakeholders, board members, management, government appointees in leadership positions, and disclosure of direct or indirect ownership by entities or individuals holding elected office

- Editorial guidelines such as transparency around sources of content and independence and diversity of sources

- Information about newsroom leadership and staff

- Sources of funding and revenue

- Governance and accountability mechanisms such as correctional policies, procedure for complaints, external assessments and oversight boards

So… if:

- it says its goals are honest journalism,

- it's privately owned (and hence not required to disclose its owners),

- it has public guidelines and policies promoting transparency, neutrality, independence and accountability,

- its newsroom leadership and staff are careful about what they put on their official Facebook accounts,

- it has an abuse@ address and an internal oversight board, and Facebook has assessed it

then that's okay? I think I'd be able to get an organisation past stronger checks, and I'm not even particularly good at that sort of thing.

That last check is the hardest one to game, but it's also likely to have a high false positive rate, so I wouldn't be too worried about my hypothetical shady organisation getting past that.

With a few people and some decent preparation you could probably fake most of this without too much effort.

In fact, I wonder what the smallest amount of people and effort you'd need to get past this: if you can get away without having face-to-face you might be able to pull and do it with 1 person, a bunch of emails and some AI generated faces (inspiration courtesy of https://youtu.be/bqPARIKHbN8 )

Elections are only allowed to be rigged by private corporations!

Essentially (de facto): yes.

Generally I like to remind people of an infamous quote, from a truly nasty period at the beginning of the last century. Because I believe it illustrates the true nature of this fact you pointed out:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

It is possible that what (eventually) will go down in the history books regarding the USA, might be how astonishingly effective the decades upon decades of positive propaganda have blinded/confused/divided it's own citizens from noticing the true nature of the machinery that runs the country (and has done so, maybe even ever since WW2).

Funny you should say that, this kind of shallow formal rules are typically what a government would propose...

And most of the times that proposal comes from corporations and or 'friends'...yes, we have a circle.

Prediction: Soon, there will be "startups" which are venture funded via state-controlled sovereign wealth funds -- achieving the same end result.

Entity Whack A Mole.

It's already happening - you can practically assume any startup formed in the Middle East (ex Israel) or China, is funded by an SWF entity, either directly or in the long chain of command.

Thomas Friedman had the perfect assessment of Zuckerberg - a wannabe Rupert Murdoch of our generation.

That's incorrectly ordered, Rupert Murdoch wishes he was Mark Zuckerberg. You can see that in the non-stop whining - projected envy - out of News Corp about the power of the FB platform over the course of many years.

Zuckerberg is also ~12 times wealthier than Murdoch (who has a declining empire).

Most recently:

"News Corp Australia blamed Google and Facebook for undermining the profitability of Australian media outlets, including 60 of the company's local newspapers that may publish for the last time next week."

https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/news-corp-...

You're interpreting the statement as being about wealth. I'd rather interpret it as being about influence and Murdoch has held more political influence than Zuckerberg and probably still does.

> That's incorrectly ordered, Rupert Murdoch wishes he was Mark Zuckerberg.

Can't say he didn't tried. But even murdoch and his billions couldn't outzuck the zuck.

"News Corp. to Acquire MySpace"

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jul-19-fi-news1...

I think they should just block ads from non-domestic media outlets instead, that way you don't have to distinguish between "state controlled" or not, just say that foreign states shouldn't run election ads in other countries.

But what do you expect? It's Facebook, it's got revenue targets to hit, partly boosted by Chinese and Arab and Russian money.

>Luckily, Facebook is the perfect arbiter for making such assertions. Only by branding foreign and independent media outlets as such, can the good name and reputation of Facebook and other altruistic independent sources of information be protected by such evil.

Ironically, "facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth/speech" is exactly the defense Zuckerberg made about the decision not to put a disclaimer on Trump's "looting and shooting" tweet. And people are still killing him over it. At this point, I'm not entirely sure what people want.

I would put it this way: I'm not sure if facebook is trying to have its cake and eat it too, or if facebook is caught between a rock and hard place.

(I'm a bit sad this is downvoted)

Different people want different things.

Quite often the same person wants different things depending on how it's framed and whether it supports their preconceptions.

And yes that person is often you or I. None of us are immune to cognitive blind spots. Smart people are sometimes the worst offenders.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People seems relevant. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-ab...

So does the concept of dysrationalia, proposed by Keith Stanovich. Ironically, the Wikipedia article quotes Robert Sternberg as saying:

> I am afraid that Stanovich has fallen into a trap—that of labeling people as 'dysrational' who have beliefs that he does not accept. And therein lies frightening potential for misuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysrationalia

But when one group of people say "Facebook should be the arbiter" and the other group says "Facebook should not be the arbiter" then both things cannot happen.