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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

That’s not true, you’re repeating the exact same wrong statement that has been said multiple times in the comments. The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be. There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything. It’s very clearly a Meta problem, they are the ones deciding to make a blanket ban on ads for social issues (or at least say they are doing it, in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case, we don’t have a lack of such advertising in the EU)

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I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.

It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.

You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).

The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.

I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.

The concern is not that you make a mistake. The concern is that you absolutely cannot trust a significant portion of the advertisers who would be your market for these ads, and who would cheerfully hammer you with attempts to get around compliance until they succeed.

These are also the folks this law is actually aimed at. So mission accomplished...

> There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything.

They didn't claim that. Many EU regulations don't actually ban the thing, but make it more expensive, cumbersome, risky, etc... This has a similar effect as censorship, but doesn't imply there is some law that say "it is illegal to say X".

The words of the TTPA:

> liable and designed to influence the outcome of an election or referendum, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level

Now, we all agree feminism is an important civil rights topic and Virginia Woolf should be (and is) celebrated in the western world. But how can a platform that is explicitly not allowed to permit advertising for political or social causes be allowed to run paid ads about "feminism" especially while Equal Pay for Equal Work is such a hot-button political issue [1] all over Europe?

So on the one hand we have the EU saying that no political or cause-centric advertising is permitted, and on the other hand the regulation is so overly broad that it is left up to everyone else to "figure it out".

As a result, and as we see here, most social media has just chosen to ban it all completely.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...

> Now, we all agree feminism is an important civil rights topic and Virginia Woolf should be (and is) celebrated in the western world. But how can a platform that is explicitly not allowed to permit advertising for political or social causes be allowed to run paid ads about "feminism" especially while Equal Pay for Equal Work is such a hot-button political issue [1] all over Europe?

This is a theatre show of material almost a century old. It is a historical piece just like movies about the Nazi regime are not political but just art dealing with a troublesome period in history.

And I would not consider women's rights to be "a hot-button issue". That implies it's heavily contested which it is not. It's just a problem that needs fixing just like environmental pollution does.

Yes you have correctly identified the nuance that the EU regulators failed to account for in their terrible laws. This is typical.

Like someone else already mentioned, this is absolutely not forbidden under EU law. And even Meta's own internal documents say this is ok.

This seems like a distinction without a difference. The EU gets to choose their rules and Meta gets to make business decisions about how to comply with those rules. One can complain about either, I suppose.

I don’t know how the cost-benefit analysis happened within Meta when considering approaches but presumably they would rather be getting paid to show more ads rather than not being paid. Their policies may also change over time as they invest more in their systems or if the rules change.

Ultimately it seems to me like the real problem was that the advertiser in this case was quite tiny and the representative they spoke to perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining the issue (and the customer was too insignificant to justify a more high-touch approach). Presumably if you’re paying a lot more for advertising you can get better treatment and perhaps Meta would also appropriately label political ads if you were wanting to spend a lot on them.

Can you quote your sources? The article doesn't mention anything about the regulation you're stating as a fact.

> The article doesn't mention anything

The article is lacking all the important details. It doesn't even quote or frame the advertisement itself.

They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?

It is interesting that Meta would have to develop a social or political content identification system in order to either label, limit targeting, or ban/censor it. It seems the hard part of complying was developed, but only to thwart the law, rather than comply. That might be a bigger FU to the EU than ignoring the law.

Also, it would take a toxic manosphere American culture to even consider feminism "political". Women's rights are an established and uncontested (by mainstream politics) part of the EU.

> The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be.

This doesn't sound like a good thing. Why shouldn't a political group be able to target people who are going to care the most about an issue/politician with an ad? Basically Meta has too good of a profile, so they aren't able to target ads. I would want to know personally, if Politician X is for/against a policy I feel strongly about.

This is to prevent bubbles, extreme polarization, and psychological manipulation. The goal is to prevent another Cambridge Analytica.

Also if you think about it, it would be bad if different people saw completely different political ads. Party could "promise" one thing to some people, and completely contradictory thing to other people. Since people would live in their tight bubbles, most of them wouldn't notice. And this ("dark ads") is something that is definitely technically possible right now.

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