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Comment by justaguyhere | Hacker News Reader

What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off.

FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get from this is worth the small loss of revenue. I bet they will also monetize the data on the list of users who turn off political ads somehow. If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to. At minimum, make it opt-in instead of opt-out.

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People are not born “ignorantly arguing”, they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints. This switch could help reduce that phenomenon a bit.

But I agree that it should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and I say that as an extremely politically-aware individual. Politics is important but it doesn’t work well on Facebook and should be discouraged there.

> they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints

I don't think this holds up to any scrutiny to be honest. There are certainly some cases where people are easily influenced, but I don't think it is that significant. Only from a worldview that puts you way above others. Aside from the problem of defining extremism, people do make choices.

I think what many people observe about conduct on social media is a form of desensitization for that matter and there are different reasons for that.

But this is actually testable, by identifying this propaganda and identifying people affected by it. We had that topic with Russians that supposedly influenced a massive amount of people with extremism for an election. But if propaganda is in place, you can identify it by words, images or statements. You can see this with ISIS. There were some poeple that indeed fell for it, but probably not by facebook adds. These people were actively groomed.

Wanting to control content by large ad corporations can also be seen as extremism, especially in the context of the free internet.

> If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to.

Why would they do it? And why would it be better if they did it?

It is possible to individually block "activists" on FB.

FB has flagged stories that are obviously false for awhile. I deliberately started posting outrageously false stories once Zuckergurg said they wouldn’t flag false posts by politicians.

There was an article recently where someone just copy and pasted posts made by Trump to make a point and their posts got flagged but not the original.

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