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Comment by devmunchies | Hacker News Reader

>If you pay them, Facebook will run any ‘political’ ad you want, even if it’s a lie

Most media outlets are propaganda machines, full of white lies. The problem many have with facebook is there's no longer a high barrier to entry to control people's opinions.

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I think it is more about the targeting. Anyone can see what Fox, CNN or MSNBC are saying but Facebook ads can be targeted practically to the individual and few know what messages are being shown to others.

Furthermore, it's not just about targeting but about silent targeting. I'm not the target audience for Fox but I can still, if I choose, see what they're saying and thus know what sort of (mis)information other people are being exposed to, and possibly respond accordingly. But silently-targeted ads mean people can be shown lies all day long without anyone else ever knowing about it.

You should be opposed to this even if you believe strongly in the marketplace of ideas, because one of the bedrock principles of the marketplace of ideas is that people can fight false claims by responding to them. But if they aren't aware those false claims even exist because Facebook is secretly only showing them to targeted subsets, that assumption is broken.

I've been thinking about this as well. it's not only the low barrier to entry, because large scale is still expensive. the problem is public visibility and scrutiny. if I spread false information in a newspaper, everyone can see it and expose the lies. on Facebook, each highly targeted ad will be seen by very few people and is therefore unlikely to be publicly exposed as misinformation.

That said, it's not like people fact-check CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, Fox News etc (though Fox News probably gets fact-checked more than the rest). There have been many times just this year that all of the above have gotten stories wrong, or published disinformation because it fit a narrative.

This doesn't even get into the number of blog-style news orgs out there. And it's coming from all sides, and really hard sometimes to tell what is, and isn't actually truthful. I'm not sure I can expect FB/Twitter to be able to handle it on an even larger scale.

Everyone is in their bubbles and it's pretty toxic in a lot of ways. And I'm not sure I could even begin to suggest a way out...

I've been trying to convince people to take the week of Christmas off social media (5-9 days, depending on weekends) ... and no traction at all. I don't have a large follower base.

Every organization you listed has fact-checkers, even Fox News, if you can believe it. That doesn't mean they're infallible, but they will all publish retractions when they get the facts wrong. The notion that major news outlets do not fact-check is itself a disinformation campaign... I wonder who might benefit from such a narrative? ;) I'd add that facts are easy to come by! They are a super useful tool of disinformation, and presented in the right context will fit any narrative you like.

It also doesn't mean they always use their fact checkers... or that they do their jobs effectively.

I could never put my finger on what makes social advertising more scary than traditional media until I read your comment. Maybe the solution is that every ad needs to be published in a public form that people can review and comment on.

A public database for political ads sounds like a good idea to me

Has he seen the political ads that ran on local television over the last 30-40 years?

I can't believe people WANT Facebook to ascertain the veracity of political ads. How do you do that? How does Facebook look at an ad for something like the recently proposed 'Green New Deal' and apply a truth value to it? And if they do 'allow' it, now it's an implicit statement of support for the position (the way Twitter's blue-check marks are a de facto mark of some kind of recognition by Twitter) and if they disallow it, it's not.

please watch the video.

In it, SBC includes the basic point that Facebook and similar are publishing companies. As such, they should "abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines, and tv news do every day".

This issue is not about opinion, omissions, or so called "white lies". It is about outright falsehoods, many of which are detailed in this speech. SBC himself in this speech includes an anecdote where he himself replicated his own version of the Milgram experiment; he convinced someone that antifa were attempting to induce spontaneous sex changes in babies at a protest. He gave this person fake devices which he was told would kill these people, and the person in fact went off and used them as instructed; that is, he willfully murdered three people as far as he was aware. (found a link describing this: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/403743-sac...)

this is not about dissatisfaction with the various biases of the news media, this is about weaponized propaganda. There is a difference, and these companies have more than enough resources to successfully tell the difference.

Facebook in and of itself is a Skinner Box and Controlling People's minds.

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