Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations | Hacker News Reader

Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations

theregister.com

20 pointsrntn18 comments

unserious word choices throughout article. "ragequit", "Zuckercorp".

better reporting would be investigating the veracity and legitimacy of both sides of the argument, rather than just reporting that there are two sides and throwing incensed language at it.

I didn't learn anything new in the article, no new insights, no changed minds.

> unserious word choices throughout article

This has been the house style of The Register since 1994.

Have you read El Reg before?

Yeah, it's been shit since forever.

This is The Register, sir.

Well I read the article and, having known nothing about the subject at all, found it somewhat informative. Having a few words of silly sprinkled throughout for amusement was fine.

I don't read The Register often, it seems to concentrate more on IT industry news. But when they have run stories of interest they do seem to follow them up, so you get a reasonably researched picture over time and a couple of opinion pieces.

Shocking Europe would try to avoid being taken over by techno fascists. So onerous. So much regulation.

If only there was some way people could collectively choose who they elect in a democracy.

Europe is already taken over by technocrats. They are just protecting their turf.

Meta to stop running political ads on Facebook and Instagram in the EU (www.euractiv.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683148

Oh no, no political ads, what a huge loss.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't think money is such a large factor in determining elections. Sure the person who wins tends to get the most donations and hence spend the most money. But that's because there is no incentive to give money to the person expected to lose.

The prime example was 2016 where the spending was more than 2 to 1 in favor of Dems. And they also secured 57 major newspaper endorsements compared to just 2 from the other side. They just threw money at it. Same thing happened in 2024 presidential. And recently in NYC mayoral race, it was even more lopsided with the person who spent less money blowing out the one who spent more.

The more likely impact of money is being able to get your message across at all. There's a saturation point. In any of these, does anyone think that if losing side spent twice as much money on their messaging they would have won? I don't. The only thing that might move the needle is if the little guy wasn't able to spend what little they spent to bootstrap support.

Of course you can try to do so without spending, like walking door to door, but that doesn't scale very well. So I think restrictions on paid political speech will help incumbents.

> This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't think money is such a large factor in determining elections.

Remember the time Michael Bloomberg ran for president? It was the most expensive primary campaign in history, as the former mayor of NYC, he was qualified for the job (unlike Steve Forbes), and the only vote he got was from Guam.

The problem with describing the "spending" like this is that it only counts money that's donated to specific candidates or their PACs.

What it doesn't count is the literal billions that have been spent capturing all of the media outlets (from TV networks and stations to newspapers, and throw in large modern media companies like Meta, Twitter/X, etc.). Also, the Republicans have a stranglehold on "political Christianity", where you basically get party sermons from the pulpit every day and twice on Sundays.

The boost from these far outweighs any specific campaign spending, because these organizations have had years to build up their messaging on their targets, that no amount of specific election campaigning can come close to touching.

Exactly. The most important and expensive part is convincing the population that the problem is x, and the campaign financing is just a "finisher" to make sure people know which party to vote for to get the x they now think is the problem fixed.

What if x is a legitimate problem and the mainstream media is ignoring it?

So you're telling me that the most manipulative people in any society aren't able to use Google and Meta to manipulate for their own gain?

... is that a problem?

I’d love for the same to happen in the US.

This seems like a huge positive.

Zuk thought the EU was the Wild West. It's not. Everyone sees the mess he made with hos polarising algorithms.

More regulation for Zuk, please.

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