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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

How much money does meta even make from political ads? Why would they even want to deal with this?

My old coworkers had a story about this. Back in 2012 the romney campaign was spending so much money on facebook ads they couldn't be served fast enough. Coworker was told to turn off the "don't show me ads like this again" functionality for Romney so they could get more views. I don't have numbers, but it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.

> it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.f

Probably because they were doing hyperspecific targeting, not because FB literally didn't have any more users to serve ads.

I doubt political ads are a major part of the mix - for one, there is little evidence that they are all that effective compared to TV ads.

We are talking about a campaign spending almost $20 billion a month, admittedly Facebook ads would only be a part of that, but why is it unrealistic that they ran out of ad spots to buy?

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but they are definitely not correct (worked in campaign finance tech for a bit).

I could see $20 million a month, but billion doesn't work here since the Romney campaign didn't spend even one billion[0].

Is this one of those weird "billion means something different in my country" things? Because even then, the miscommunication is usually between billion (10^9 in most English) and trillion (10^12), in short scale[1].

[0]: https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/P80003353/?tab=summary

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

No, pretty sure "million" means 10^6 everywhere.

At $20b/mo, you could literally buy the TV networks and show whatever programming you wanted. Or make a decent down payment on Facebook.

The short answer is, a lot of money. Like, a lot a lot. See a recent article from the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/us/politics/senate-republ...

The low tens of millions on digital ads across all senate campaigns. That is definitely not a lot a lot.

This is but one example of one PAC for one party. I don’t know how many PACs exist, but easily hundreds. Thousands? A lot of money is donated to campaigns and PACs across local, state, and national elections, and a lot of that money is spent on advertising of some form, and a lot of that (as the article describes) has been shifted to digital. I would call it a lot a lot.

It once again makes me wonder what they want to do with all that money. Meta is one of the most powerful companies. They get all this money to sell some of that money.

What really is the end game here? The whole point of money or power would be to use it to do something you care about? What use is money and power for the sake of itself? Why have it if all you want is more of it?

At least some rich people seem to want to do something with their riches and power. Which makes the rest of them even more of an enigma.

Perhaps a Walter White quote is fitting here: "I'm in the empire business."

That's likely as accurate as one could be here.

It makes sense that people that want 'power for sake of power' wins the power game. Everyone else are optimizing for something else.

I just don't believe such person exist. Everyone wants something.

I wonder if Meta ever ran its own political ads, without a specific candidate paying for them. That might be one reason to obscure the advertiser. (I mean, they _definitely_ did this with generic "get out and vote" advertising, but of course that's not overtly favoring one candidate or the other.)

It could be favoring one over the other if they biased to display to specific demographics.

Depends if it’s geographically targeted to favor your choice political candidate. Say only run get out the vote for people that are likely to vote for candidate A over B

Zuckerberg has so much money, it would be cheaper and less risky to just pay somebody to pay somebody to pay somebody to fund a PAC with offshore accounts with hidden ownership.

Just open a movie studio, money laundering problem solved!

Bloomberg spent enough money to give every US citizen $1000000 on his last presidential run!

(Not really… there were just some newscasters that were really bad at math)

But he did spend like $1B as just one candidate in the primaries.

We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs etc. The spending is so wasteful. If they care so much about the problems they're campaigning on, they could use the money to work on fixing them.

> We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs

The fact that this isn't already the case is so weird. Probably due to the age of the constitution and legal system, its deification and the generic allergy to any evolution on that front.

Campaign regulations, including fairness in representation and budget limits are necessary for a healthy democracy, otherwise it's too susceptible to influence by rich people.

For instance, in Bulgaria that's taken to a somewhat extreme point - party/coalition lists running for election (it's a parliamentary democracy) get a fixed budget from the country if they fit the requirements (enough candidates, enough signatures) with a maximum allowance for donations and own funds to be used. Ads can't be just an attack on a rival, and have to include disclaimers who they're for, who they're paid for, and that buying and selling votes is a crime (an issue in Bulgarian elections, sadly). The system isn't perfect but IMHO it'd be far worse without those protections.

I was thinking you were going on a different direction. Like an amendment requiring newscasters to have at least a 700 on the SAT Math.

My hope would be that we have an intelligent society that can easily see through the mistakes. There are so many mistakes and half truths on the news that it's almost not worth following. I view everything they say with some level of skepticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krHkjdnniDE

is what you are referring to.

I do not think it is about that. Chan-Zuckerberg initiative donated about half a billion to finance elections infrastructure in 2020. It may be about power but certainly not about money

For a company whose bread & butter is “outrage” I would imagine political ads of the type you’re likely to see on Facebook in 2022 are like having someone else do your work for you. And they get paid for the privilege to boot!

Political influence is about power, not money. Money is only one proxy for power.

idk about Meta specifically, but each election cycle is worth a couple billion $ in online ad revenue alone.

https://www.opensecrets.org/online-ads

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