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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Zuckerberg doesn't just cut his losses and remove political ads. It does not seem worth it financially or non-financially.

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That’s unfortunately naive —- as we’ve heard, these days “the personal is political”. To a lot of people, if you disallow politics you are also restricting personal expression. Banning politics would lead to yet another doubling of the avalanche of one-sided hit pieces out there.

Refusing to allow that content as paid ads doesn't make the content go away. It just makes people game the system to get views instead of paying for views. Then the moderation problem would be even harder.

Exactly. I work in digital advertising and we just don't take political or issue based campaigns. The spend isn't worth it. The hassle isn't worth it. The optics aren't worth it.

How do you decide if an ad is political or not?

You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.

The problem is that FB wants to eschew all of the responsibility for content running through their platform and run everything 100% programmatically for scale. They expect the advertising user to know what's kosher vs what's not, and they expect the advertised-to user to moderate content. They refuse to put in place even the most basic of business controls. That strategy uh... doesn't work. As evidenced by their many FTC consent orders and massive fines.

Because he will need it when he himself is running for office.

Non-financially is a big one...they can really determine the outcome of elections here , that is a power they don't want to loose

> that is a power they don't want to lose What makes you think they want that power in the first place?

Because they get to sell that power (advertising space) to others.

IIRC, Zuck has debated running in the future. Having Facebook with that power would probably benefit.

With the fit everyone threw over Trump having (relatively speaking) minor business connections, I'd hate to see what people would say over Zuckerberg running for any sort of office.

I'm not really sure how to answer that question without just saying how extremely obvious it is that a massive national (and international) company would benefit massively from having influence over USA national politics.

It is equally obvious that there would be an extreme backlash by politicians and regulators if facebook ever decides to (openly) use that power. Also, it would alienate at least half their user base.

In short, why would they even want to be seen as possibly having that power?

Oh, to be clear, I suspect they definitely don't want to be seen as having (or using) that power.

Really ? It is obvious if you see their track record for last few years...I mean the ceo is having private dinner with both wings

It is obvious that the CEO of one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world would have dinner with world leaders.

I'm not sure I see anything that supports your conclusion. Have you considered what evidence would make you change your mind?

Power doesn't just fall into people's laps, and normally those who don't want power falling into their laps take the first opportunity to reject it.

What's a political ad? Better yet, what's a NON-political ad?

If McDonalds advertizes how good and healthy their Big Mac is, is it political? What if someone complains that it contradicts some pending legislation? What if someone complains about the racial make up of the cast in the ad? What if the ad mentions a word that later someone complains about?

We live in a nation where we can't agree on what a man or woman is, and what that means. In fact, just talking about it is now political.

So, who's going to judge whether something is political or not?

The boundary may be fuzzy, but that doesn't mean there aren't clear things like "if you're promoting or smearing a particular candidate for an elected political position, that's a political ad".

The clear outliers aren't the thing the OP was referring to. It is precisely the "fuzzy" ones in the middle that can be interpreted both ways depending on context and political leaning, etc.

And I'm saying, don't pass judgement on the fuzzy ones. Draw the line where it's indisputable; you'll miss some but it's better than missing everything.

There are clear, well-defined rules around what constitutes a political advertisement, published by the FEC. Some states have guidelines that go further. A smart place to start, instead of feigned ignorance or poorly constructed strawman arguments, might be there.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-di...

The rules are not clear or well defined, and often result in litigation. Often, what becomes determinitive is the context around the ad or the situation of the entity placing it, and not the ad itself. So, to do this Facebook would also have to track entities, etc.

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