There's simply no reason why Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media company needs to be involved in the business of political campaigns. They're completely free to decline such business and refuse to run political advertisements. It's not like they'd lose much: the income they earn from political ads is a drop in the bucket, proportionally speaking.
Given the intense amount of scrutiny they're under, and their apparent inability to make clear, consistent, and sensible rules regarding their content, perhaps it would be better for them to just get out of the business altogether.
Are they? In the US radio and TV cannot refuse such ads. I'm not sure how/if this regulation applies to Facebook (radio/tv get there because as a limited space part of their license says that have to support them), but Facebook is too big to try to thumb its nose at politicians like that. There are many ways politics can make life hard for Facebook while staying in the letter of the constitution.
Facebook when it was 100 friends from Harvard could ignore politics. Facebook with millions of users cannot.
> I'm not sure how/if this regulation applies to Facebook
It doesn't.
> Facebook is too big to try to thumb its nose at politicians like that.
I don't really see it as "thumbing its nose." Politicians and their backers would still be free to post whatever they want. But they wouldn't be able to use a paid advertisement to force their (potentially false) messages into people's News Feeds.
> They're completely free to decline such business and refuse to run political advertisements.
Except that if politicians want to run ads on Facebook, and Facebook declines, then politicians will, with impunity, have the power to enact laws that will damage Facebook.
People who end up in a position of power can be vindictive.
You say this as if it were something simple or even possible to achieve. How do you tell the difference between political and non-political money? Not taking money directly from campaigns is easy enough, but that’s not where most of the ‘political money’ comes from. What about every dollar that’s spent to promote a political idea that doesn’t come directly from a campaign? How do you even discern between a political idea and a non-political one? There’s no way to do any of that from a neutral position, because all of that is highly subjective.
We’re taking about paid advertisements, not mere posts. The volume of paid ads is infinitesimally small compared to user-generated content. It should be very straightforward to review ad submissions to determine whether they are selling a product or service, as opposed to an idea, promotion or complaint about a person or group of people, and deny by default if there’s any doubt.
I just opened Facebook and checked all of the orgs who have targeted me with ads. About 15% of them were companies that don’t sell any sort of product, and were just promoting some sort of idea. Of that, only one of them was an actual political party. That doesn’t even include ads for products that include some sort of political messaging (something that’s pretty commonplace now). What’s more, that assessment of which orgs were delivering a political message is entirely based on my own opinions. You might look at the same list and draw different conclusions. What you’re talking about simply doesn’t seem possible, and I can’t even see any reason why it would be a good idea to begin with.
You just said you yourself were able to identify them. Why couldn’t someone else?
And, suppose they were missing from your News Feed. How much would you miss them? And why would you need them back?
Finally, I’d love to hear about some of these “ads for products that have political messaging” (assuming they’re not the obvious case of T-shirts, stickers, etc. promoting a candidate or cause).
> You just said you yourself were able to identify them. Why couldn’t someone else?
Because as I also said, anybody else would likely make different judgements. The assessment I described is entirely my own opinion, and it would be impossible for me (or anybody else) to make any form of assessment that wasn’t influenced by opinion.
> And, suppose they were missing from your News Feed. How much would you miss them?
I personally don’t care about ads at all. But you’re understating how extreme your suggestion is. News outlets would be excluded from any sort of promotion on FB. Basically any NGO would be excluded, including environmental groups.
I would expect such an extreme idea to have a very strong justification, and I can’t see anything other than FB employees not liking it.
> Finally, I’d love to hear about some of these “ads for products that have political messaging”
Nike and Gillette have two incredibly high profile examples. There’s plenty of smaller ones too. Any company that participates in pride month is delivering a political message. The issue with classifying political speech is that it depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content of the speech. The graphics used in a weather report would be considered politically charged by a flat earther.
It is simply not possible for FB to take a neutral position on this matter, so your choice is between FB taking a political stance on what election ads are allowed on its platform, or having FB not moderate them.
I’m not sure I agree it’s such a big problem, other than having to upset some advertisers by declining advertisements that used to get automatic acceptance. Remember, Facebook is still a private enterprise and they’re under no obligation to make everyone (or anyone) happy. They are free to limit activity they find inconsistent with their moral view, just like Apple does.
And also keep in mind, these are ads we’re talking about. People who want to publish political speech can still do so on their own pages or status updates, but they won’t get paid distribution into users’ news feeds.
If you accept the argument that forbidding political ads is not possible, then I guess it depends on how much you care about large corporations ability to interfere with democratic processes. Having FB act as the gatekeeper to which political ads are allowed on the worlds largest social media platforms, and which are not seems like a pretty bad outcome to me.
> Remember, Facebook is still a private enterprise and they’re under no obligation to make everyone (or anyone) happy.
Sure, but this is kinda irrelevant to the discussion about what they should do, or more importantly, what they should be allowed to do. The concept of Net Neutrality would be an almost identical violation of freedom of association, but it’s a regulation with a huge amount of popular support.
> If you accept the argument that forbidding political ads is not possible
I don’t agree (at least insofar as this is their policy and not, say, a legal restriction). I think they can get reasonably close using good judgment, and there will always be arguments about the edges. Such is life. We can’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.
None of this argument is about regulation or coercion, by the way. This is really about what I think their own policies should be, not about government regulation of political speech, which is an even bigger minefield.
I’d say this stance is based on the presupposition that a solution implemented imperfectly is in fact good, or at least better than no solution implemented at all. You say yourself that this would require FB to make (naturally subjective) judgements about what is or is not political. The very best case scenario would be that FB ends up marginalizing fringe views.
But would you even trust FB as an organisation to reach a level of neutrality where only the most fringe views were marginalized? I certainly wouldn’t. The alternative is simply that FB leaves it up to the audience to make their own judgements about the credibility of the content they view, something I’d consider to be a far superior outcome. Nothing FB does will ever relieve people of the burden of thinking for themselves.
> I’d say this stance is based on the presupposition that a solution implemented imperfectly is in fact good, or at least better than no solution implemented at all.
Yes. :)
> You say yourself that this would require FB to make (naturally subjective) judgements about what is or is not political. The very best case scenario would be that FB ends up marginalizing fringe views.
That sounds good to me!
> But would you even trust FB as an organisation to reach a level of neutrality where only the most fringe views were marginalized? I certainly wouldn’t.
Why not? We have no evidence to suggest they'd be terrible at it.
> The alternative is simply that FB leaves it up to the audience to make their own judgements about the credibility of the content they view, something I’d consider to be a far superior outcome.
Do you really consider the current state of affairs to be superior and/or ideal? Perhaps I would agree with you in a perfect world where more people were naturally distrustful of content, but we've seen that a large segment of the population is not particularly good at separating the wheat from the chaff.
> You say yourself that this would require FB to make (naturally subjective) judgements about what is or is not political. The very best case scenario would be that FB ends up marginalizing fringe views.
> That sounds good to me!
I think we just have very different values here. I’d consider this to be incredibly harmful. I remember a time when “gay people are just normal people who should be treated with respect and dignity” was a very fringe view. My parents remember when “black people shouldn’t be segregated from the rest of society” was a fringe view.
> Why not? We have no evidence to suggest they'd be terrible at it.
I think a lot of people would say that there’s plenty of evidence that FB isn’t capable of politically neutral moderation.
> Do you really consider the current state of affairs to be superior and/or ideal?
I think for as long as we’ve had language we’ve had misinformation. I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about the current state of affairs at all. There is no system you can put in place to determine what’s true on behalf of other people, because no matter what you do, people still need to make their own judgements about the information they consume.
There is only one institution in most democratic societies that acts as an authority on matters of fact or truth, and that is the justice system. In that system, every fact put forward for consideration is subjected to extensive scrutiny and debate, yet it still produces endless amounts of controversy. Every other truth seeking institution, whether public or private, is even less capable of establishing consensus.
The problem you can’t solve with such systems is that the truth is a fundamentally subjective matter. Any authority established to determine the truth can do nothing more than reflect its own biases and prejudices. History has no examples of misinformation being defeated by censorship, the only solution is competing view points and critical thought. It’s not a problem FB can solve, nor one we should want them to try and solve.
I think there's a mixup in this conversation going on. I thought the question was whether or not Facebook could determine whether a post was political in nature or not (biasing on the side of "it is") and refusing to accept money in exchange for distributing it.
Never was this thread about Facebook's role as an arbiter of "truth." The difficulty of that is much, much higher, and one that I agree shouldn't be entrusted to Facebook (or probably to any single entity, for that matter).
Again, this is not about whether people should be allowed to post their opinions on Facebook. It's really about whether Facebook should be used to amplify political speech; and also (secondarily), if they are used this way, whether they should allow advertisers to narrowly target political speech to audiences. With respect to your "gay rights" fringe argument, I see no difference in how that viewpoint (as formerly a fringe view) would be treated from a then-mainstream viewpoint under a broad rule like this. Neither pro- nor anti- rights messages would qualify for amplification.
BTW, there's a great discussion with Alex Stamos (former CSO at Facebook) in which he discusses it with more nuance and detail, but tries to thread the needle more than I feel comfortable doing: https://galley.cjr.org/public/conversations/-LsHiyaqX4DpgKDq...
The whole issue seems to be based around making judgements about the truth to me. The initial problem is that political ads are high risk for distribution of false or deceptive information. Fact checking them is too fraught with issues, so you just decide to ban them all instead. Now you’ve just kicked the can down the road a bit and narrowed your search of truth to “is this political or non-political”.
> It's really about whether Facebook should be used to amplify political speech
Which I would assert that any attempt to control would require FB to make value judgements about said speech, naturally resulting in FB enforcing some particular set of values.
I would say that FB and other big tech firms have been following a trend that’s been seen in government a lot in recent times. Identify some threat to public wellbeing (in terms of government the canonical example would be terrorism), and leverage it to gain more power and influence. It’s no secret that society generally walks away from a terrorist attack with less freedom than it had before. For the big tech firms the threat has been “fake news” or “misinformation”, and they’ve been pretty consistent with the response of “we need to exert more control over the flow of information and public discourse to combat this”. Putting aside any debate about whether they should be allowed to do this, I think it’s overall a harmful outcome for society, and I’m surprised that FB hasn’t taken the same approach in this case.
In this scenario, politicians and their backers would still be free to post whatever they want. But they wouldn't be able to use a paid advertisement to force their (potentially false) messages into people's News Feeds.
Why should they? People can make up their own minds we don't need to restrict online advertisements. False messages appear in all other forms of advertisement, facebook or twitter is no different.
Because the potential for societal harm is arguably greater when politicians manipulate the population through falsehoods than it is by purchasing a good or service based on false advertising. And consumers have direct recourse to the law (i.e., damages) for fraud, whereas no such recourse is available to the public until re-election if they elect a politician based on falsehoods.
But how is this different than political ads on the radio or tv or a billboard? Sounds like you are against political advertisements of any kind.
I don't disagree there could be damage done by misinformation, but I don't think that's a compelling reason to ban political ads. I still think people should look at the ads and decide for themselves what is true.
This is a tricky question. Traditionally, communication with the public was mainly two-way; the public could directly question candidates and hold them accountable there if the candidate lied. I’m very much for traditional free speech here as there is direct accountability.
With the rise of broadcast media (TV, radio, newspapers) came a new era of marketing-driven candidacies. Candidates became much further removed from the process of attracting voters, and they figured out ways (helped by Madison Avenue ad men) to manipulate the public using those ads. By the 1990s we reached peak crazy with negative ads, innuendo, third party ads, and the elimination of “equal time”
rules on broadcast TV that required at least an attempt to level the playing field.
Now with social media, we have the most challenging combination of marketing savvy, cheap and automated provisioning of ads, and precise targeting - and even worse accountability. We’ve even heard possibilities that politicians might target ads to non-aligned voters misdirecting them as to voting instructions or locations.
So: am I against free speech? No. I’m definitely a believer in it. But am I against delivering political advertisements through certain channels? Yes.
I think they are working in new territories. Their options now are allow all candidate for public office ads or refuse all of such ads. The tendency, given our 1A context would be to allow all.
But I think the Congress should step in and set the rules for how companies should govern this new territory. Not doing so leaves an important aspect of democracy in the hands of companies to make decisions for politicians.
It's not clear to me that one could always decide what constitutes a political ad in the first place. Sure, there is the obvious, vote for candidate X.
But what about issue advocacy ads? Are ads from an industry advocate group political? Say it was funded by the Koch brothers defending fossil fuels? Or what about an ad from the Southern Poverty Law Center to fight for disenfranchised voters? Or what about an anti-vax group looking to mobilize their base?
So if planned parenthood runs an ad inviting people to join their network of supporters to protest in support of a right to abortion - would that be paid political speech in your eyes? How about if the Catholic Church runs an ad for a pro-life YouTube channel?
It's easy to say things like "not be a platform for paid political speech". I'm sure you have a clear cut line in your head and it makes sense to you. But to expect a large corporation - or some thoughtful government committee - to draw that line with any consistency or articulable principle seems incredibly naive.
As I've said elsewhere, we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The decision matrix doesn't need to be perfectly consistent or articulable. (As Justice Stewart once said of pornography, "I know it when I see it.") Biasing towards denial will help make Facebook a much more peaceful place.
Besides, as I've said elsewhere, this is about paid distribution, not banning from Facebook. People and organizations should remain free to do and say whatever they like in their own groups and pages, and members or individuals should remain free to share these messages if they like. But that's a different thing from forcing a message into someone's feed.
Maybe the government needs to A. bring back the fairness doctrine. B. Update it for ads/propaganda/social media.
Say for instance they created an agency that basically monitors/fact checks news and advertisements.
Or it could just be political ads. I think the government should enforce honesty in political ads, I mean allowing lying in political ads seems to say corruption is allowed. As lying = corruption.
Or no agency and just severe consequences/litigation for publishing/republishing 'fake news' without some sort of byline saying 'this is fake news', and dishonest political ads could also be sued against.
I mean as litigious as we are there's a gold mine for the legal industry here.
How is Facebooks ad pricing structured? Do people pay Facebook on the amount of users Facebook claims it will reach or by actually views counted by whether or not it loaded or was clicked?
It seems possible that Facebook could charge people claiming it will reach 10 million users even if every single one of those people ends up blocking it.
Given the intense amount of scrutiny they're under, and their apparent inability to make clear, consistent, and sensible rules regarding their content, perhaps it would be better for them to just get out of the business altogether.