Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.
Just as I rarely see petitions for "equal and free advertising for all candidates" I rarely see "hold authorities accountable for their actions". Sure there's related arguments among the clammer, but never hear it stated that simply.
It seems a little nuts that I'm not allowed to endorse my preferred candidate because my endorsement has value and my candidate hit their cap.
Or have an independent panel measure the media exposure of each candidate. Then compensate them accordingly.
And people who are not candidates and who want to express their opinion, they can: (1) vote, or (2) be a candidate. What they can't do is buy media time or advertisements, etc., which many wouldn't equate with "free speech" anyway.
Wouldn't that disproportionately remove only young urban democrats from political advertising?
also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?
If that were the case, it might actually be beneficial to Democrats since they wouldn't waste money advertising to those people meanwhile Republicans wouldn't be able to change their minds with advertising.
Or it could go the other way, and inability to constantly be reminding those people how great the dems are and how important it is to vote means the turnout will be lower among those who turned off ads than if they hadn't been able to.
(And I agree with everyone saying that FB cares more about making bank from the election than about actually improving the situation.)
Well, did you read the first two sentences of the article?
> Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters.
The USA Today article is easily located: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-v...
My conclusion is that Hacker News has a bias in favor of a news source like the BBC over a news source like USA Today which is strong enough to overcome USA Today having the original story yet have the BBC article be the one voted up.
Especially considering that there are a LOT of factors driving why one of many articles describing the same thing would get upvoted. Choice of headline and time of day come to mind as factors that sometimes outweigh “original source.”
My own n=handful experience is that I can sometimes post one of my own essays, get crickets, and then it will get a second chance, and BOOM, front page.
At least one of those times, the essay has gotten traction elsewhere, like Twitter and Reddit, so one possible explanation is that sometimes people upvote articles about a subject they have seen elsewhere.
If that were the case, it would favour secondary articles over the original.
I think a moderator took a look at the two articles and felt like the BBC one was a bit more neutral, while the USA Today one was a bit more press-releasey, so didn't change the URL. I haven't looked at either article; I'm just reporting how we tend to consider these things.
This means the revenue KPI of the ads team would go down right? So will never happen.