Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

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It would give Facebook way too much power if they could decide what is true and what is not. Better allow lies than to block free speech.

I wonder if this open letter by employees advocating for more control over content combined with Mark Zuckerberg's 'hands-off stance on political ads' are just a coordinated act of 'good cop, bad cop' designed to manipulate the public. Also, my cynical side thinks that maybe some of these government authorities are in on this charade.

It seems like a show to make people think that the good employees of Facebook are on the public's side. Whatever the big mean Zuckerberg wants must be bad for everyone.

Facebook must have a PR team the size of a small country working for them by now. Of course everything they do is orchestrated. We have to be really cynical to see through the BS.

The government is completely under the thumb of these big corporations. Many of the regulations that are coming out of Washington are carefully crafted by corporate lobbyists to superficially look like they're bad for corporations and good for the public, but in reality they're intended to give corporations more power and to create a moat around their monopolies. The government and corporations are on the same team; their common objective is to fool the public into slowly accepting the erosion of their most basic rights so that corporations can have more money and governments can have more power for themselves.

> Facebook should allow politicians to lie in ads

There are more options than "Facebook regulates its ads" and "Facebook permits everything."

I am in favor of having a permanent, public repository of political ads, where they have to sit for a "cooling-down" period prior to going out. This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.

Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads. There are a lot of options between open season and censorship, and it's only to Facebook's benefit that the debate is constrained to this axis.

We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse. Because you know that any such institution would just let pass false information that just happens to comport with liberal beliefs, while giving enhanced scrutiny to assertions from other viewpoints.

I was just going to upvote and keep scrolling, but I saw the three replies to your post critique something you said that I strongly agreed with.

> We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse

This so true in this day and age. The quality of journalism has collectively nosedived, but the journalists keep producing and continue to guide the “conversation”. I’m not quite sure what those who disagree with the statement actually do believe is going well and why journalists need to have even more control over the conversation.

> ...would just let pass false information that just happens to comport with liberal beliefs

This is the natural course for a technology company in modern society. The biases of tech company employees is clearly more left-leaning. If Facebook employees or contractors were deciding what’s true and false, the information displayed on Facebook would (does?) have a leftist slant. This is a bad thing to any fair-minded person and why Facebook shouldn’t be regulating free speech in political ads.

  We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse.

This statement doesn't make sense to me. Nothing to do with conservative vs. liberal biases; just that the majority of current political discourse does not go through even nominally journalistic outlets, let alone rigorously journalistic.

> We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse

How does "a permanent, public repository of political ads" give journalists any advantage? I just mentioned them as one potential user of a public database.

If anything, I think journalists need more influence on political discourse. Currently the discourse is controlled by media companies, not journalists - and there is a big difference there.

> This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.

I believe this proposal to be worse than the current state of affairs. I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body, and doubly so to one which skews >90% to one political party.

> Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads.

Once again, I do not understand this rational! I assume you do not like how one party in particular is acting, but you would delegate that very same party the power to oversee the censors over all online electoral ads?

> I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body

Who said anything about censorship?

What I proposed has two parts. One, when a political ad is bought, it must wait a certain amount of time (I propose a week) before being displayed. Two, immediately on being bought, it must be made publicly accessible in a permanent database.

The latter lets anyone fact check the ad. They DON'T get to take down the ad. But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users. This deters micro-targeting groups with misinformation. It also creates a public record of what a campaign has said to whom, for contemporaneous and later reference by the public.

A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist." I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media. I fundamentally disagree with censoring political speech, even lies. But the current system is unworkable. We need heightened and broadened disclosures for micro-targeted ads.

> But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users.

I believe I understand the implied difference between sequestering a video somewhere where it can be evaluated by the public and simply "blasting it to users" alongside content they are consuming, but I wonder if sequestering videos in this way would have the effect you think it will have. It's a system that would reward highly provocative videos with the potential to immediately go viral regardless of their intrinsic merit or truthfulness.

> A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist."

Right. The issue with the system you're describing is, entirely too many people will react to an online story from the NY Times pointing out a dozen untruthful things about the latest, newly introduced and sequestered angry political ad from whoever by delighting in the distress caused by the lies in the ad, joking about how the libs have been owned, passing links around to the video, and generally spreading falsehoods about the critiques of the ad and the people doing the critiqing. If the whole trolling effort is successful then it will become a meta-story about stupidity and falsehood among the people who aren't dumb enough to believe whatever is being asserted in the ad, but the one thing that will not happen is everyone joining together to condemn the falsehoods in the ad.

> I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media.

Right, and as nice and democratizing as that can be, the practical effect is often to legitimize bullshitters and put them on the same level as serious people. I am afraid in the example above that is part of how these ads would go viral.

Or maybe it's not all that bad. I guess I hope not. I do think your idea is interesting.

So long as it deters misleading ads, does the mechanism really matter? It doesn't have to be strict consensus.

I am not at all sure it would deter misleading ads, since the truth or falsehood of a given claim or set of claims does not necessarily matter much to a chunk of the population. I am pretty sure the mechanism the OP described might reward especially outrageous ads designed to break out of the cage and go viral, in the manner I described.

I'm not saying it's not worth a try.

option 2 will create status quo bias. The system in power will marginally favor ads that keeps the current system in power.

option 1 can't be effective unless you also know the targeting criteria of the ads. Otherwise, interested parties cannot create 'counter propaganda' at the same cost/benefit ratio as the original propaganda campaign. And all it is really doing is decreasing the time to counter propaganda, not reducing the volume of it.

good ideas tho

And yet Facebook is a privately owned company and thus should be free to allow or deny any content including particular political ads. Isn’t that the whole freedom of speech thing?

Facebook, like any corporation, has a charter granting it extraordinary powers by the society in which it operates. Implicit in that grant is the idea that the corporation betters society by its existence. If, by reaching a certain scale, that society by necessity has to say "hey, you need to do X because you're not keeping up your end of the bargain", that's completely fine.

> Implicit in that grant is the idea that the corporation betters society by its existence.

Really? I don't think that is a thing, but happy to learn otherwise with a reference to some legal doctrine or legislation that spells this out.

That isn't to say that there can't be additional legislation that regulates an industry beyond the legal infrastructure that enables the formation of a corporation.

You're asking for "legal doctrine". I am pointing out to you telos.

I mean, forget stakeholder theory and other minimally responsible theories of operation, because that stuff is kind of new--just look at judicial dissolution. It exists on the books and it's been done in practice. That ability would have no reason to exist if it were to not protect the United States and its citizens from the malfeasance of a corporate entity to which a charter has been granted.

But this argument is wholly backwards. Why should corporate entities be granted any rights at all? We deign to grant them the status of existence. We, the people, not the fictitious ones but those pesky "natural" ones. Why should a corporation exist for any other reason than to better our society? Why should a society empower random individuals to create liability-shielding immortal pseudopeople if that society doesn't think they're supposed to make that society better by existing?

Hell, go even further. Why should a society do anything if it doesn't make the society in aggregate better for the doing?

> Why should a corporation exist for any other reason than to better our society?

Because it represents liberty. The freedom for people (natural ones) to assemble and organize and pursue their own interests as they see fit.

Our social contract is that the government protects the rights of individuals not that individuals serve the abstract needs of "society".

Of course that doesn't mean that a corporation (or any other group) is outside the law. I'm just pushing back on your notion that there is some abstract litmus test that says a group (corporate or otherwise) must "better our society". I don't even know what that really means and it sounds to me very much like the tyranny of the majority.

> Because it represents liberty. The freedom for people (natural ones) to assemble and organize and pursue their own interests as they see fit.

Liberty requires limited liability now, does it? Strikes me as a very feudal idea of liberty--the liberty to do unto others but to escape them doing unto you.

> I don't even know what that really means and it sounds to me very much like the tyranny of the majority.

It means that a corporation is trusted to not be an asshole to the people giving it its literal-not-figurative superpowers and when that corporation breaches that trust its fictional life can and should be forfeit.

What you call "the tyranny of the majority," I call "a community and a polity having the right to not be mooked by the first con man to come down the pike." Because people, actual people, matter more.

I feel like you are changing the goal posts. I explicitly said that any group isn't above the law. So I'm not exempting fraudulent behavior by any means. Nor did I say that liberty required limited liability. I've tried to suggest that my thoughts are about all sorts of groups, not just limited liability corporations.

What I was pushing back at was your suggestion that a corporation must "benefit society". That particular phrasing is completely open ended in my mind suggesting way too much power to be wielded if you aren't "benefiting society". Perhaps that isn't what you intended but IMHO appeals to "improving society", "helping the children", "the greater good" in the abstract are either power grabs or empty phrases. The specifics mater.

"All sorts of groups"? Only a very few sort of groups need special legal imprimatur to exist. And if you want to be granted special and extraordinary treatment by a community, why would that community not expect you to not be an asshole about it? If you don't want to uphold your end of that bargain there's always the general partnership. It confers no special legal privileges, it's purely contractual, but it's actually a "group of people" rather than A Fictitious Person Created To Avoid Liability. In my experience conflating these is never, never, done for good reasons, so I'd certainly like to hear yours. Maybe it'll be the exception, so lay it on me.

Here's a concrete example of what's actually a power grab: the Dole company literally-not-figuratively knocking over the Hawaiian monarchy and the subsequent creation of the "Republic of Hawaii" as a Dole-owned, Dole-operated state. Why is that not a "power grab" about which you get up in arms? Why is it that it's a "power grab" to say "hey you have a duty to not do that kind of shit"?

What you are categorizing as a "power grab" is a refusal to accept the status quo as legitimate just because it happens to be where we're at right now. Why is it that that advocacy, the use of the state to control its creations, is the "power grab" here--and not the accumulation of that power in the first place?

The silence speaks volumes.

Or maybe I just got tired of trying to explain myself.

You keep changing the topic and I keep trying to come back to my observation that requiring a corporation to "benefit society" is not actually a thing in law and would be a bad idea in any case.

If your definition of "benefit society" just means "doesn't break laws". Then I would agree with you but there really isn't any need for such indirection and expansive language about "benefiting society" in that case.

So I gathered that you were suggesting that there is some administrative hoop that a corporation must jump through to convince you that they are "benefiting society". But that language is hopelessly broad and just begging to be abused by anyone in power who doesn't like what a disfavored group is doing (even when they aren't breaking any laws).

I bet there are a lot of people who think that Fox News isn't "benefiting society" and I'll bet there are also a lot of people who think that CNN or MSNBC aren't benefiting society. Are you telling me that the majority opinion should hold here and organizations disfavored by the majority can be legislated out of existence because they don't "benefit society"?

Agreed. The ability to assemble and organize and pursue interests is distinct from the specific mode of organization of the limited-liability company, where stockholders (the owners) and protected from liability for the actions of the company. Other modes of organization (a partnership) arepossible, and could be argued to have stronger social outcomes due to the lack of insulation from liability.

This is such a tired argument, but I'll throw this out anyway: the parent isn't claiming that Facebook is legally prohibited from selecting which content they allow through their platform. They are legally allowed to choose to block certain content, but this does not make them exempt from public criticism.

They do seem to have successfully shifted the debate to whether or not they should be deciding about the ad instead of why they are somehow exempt from FEC regulations.

I'm pretty sure that the government is in on it. Every elected member of government is probably just thinking to themselves "I better be really nice to Facebook if I want to get myself re-elected".

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