Comment by ecwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecwilson | Hacker News Reader

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I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions.

> Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech.

Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse?

Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.

Disclaimer: I don't work for facebook. I don't speak for my company's policies either.

- You overestimate the zeal with which the grass-roots folk will engage in that behavior, especially if they know it is undercutting fb model. Ad tech is also evolving everyday meaning a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away. You should also look up the articles about # of twitter/reddit contributors (including likes) compared to the US population for example (VERY minimal).

- In theory you can politicize anything: Do you think it is possible to talk environmental/social/civic controls etc. today without having a political bent? Meaning the political ad blocking is probably not as comprehensive as the twitter block portrays.

- For all the negativity politics gets, this is something that impacts us very much in our day to day life. Shutting it out completely is probably more of a problem than working with the system. I don't think we can comprehend the macro impact in this subject: As it stands today, some companies saying no just means more money for other corporations.

As you can see I do have a very practical (read cynical) view towards how much mental bandwidth people have towards the small slights in life (which may have a giant impact later) compared to their day to day requirements. As lacking I am in solutions, I don't believe it is sledge hammer (stop ads) OR crowd sourced (let's all click on all ads).

> a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away

That's gonna be a no for me dawg. If it turns out to be content I want to see badly at all, I'll search for statistically improbable strings in the part that I can see so I can find an alternate source (/r/savedyoucompletingacaptcha?).

> so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech.

Why don’t you buy it? If you ban “political” ads you are going to start drawing a lot of arbitrary lines. Is an ad for a climate change organization a political ad? How about an ad for UBI? An ad for a local Catholic Church? An ad about farming subsidies? An ad for birth control?

All of these are one step away from direct advertisements for candidates and are very political topics for many people. Twitter hasn’t actually banned political ads, they’ve just used a definition that makes it easy for them to claim to have done so.

I think the general theme I see is that folks expect companies to solve problems that their governments must be solving. And when they don't get it uniform, everyone's mad.

I'd rather live in a world where companies aren't trying to push their morals on me and have a central entity (govt) arbitrate the same (Believe me I see evil in both places). I have been thinking on and off about the role of government in the current world and sadly I can't see a place where it can be as tiny as people want.

>I think the general theme I see is that folks expect companies to solve problems that their governments must be solving. And when they don't get it uniform, everyone's mad.

People want an outcome and don't particularly care where it comes from, public vs. private. If one fails, they'll push on the other to find a leverage point. Example: A pundit can say some truly awful and damaging shit and it's legal under the law. But if you target their advertisers, that's the leverage point that matters.

>I'd rather live in a world where companies aren't trying to push their morals on me and have a central entity (govt) arbitrate the same (Believe me I see evil in both places).

A company should be free to push its morals on you, given that the market allows it, and their morals aren't illegal. Right?

Personally, in the current environment of profit-at-all-costs capitalism, the major flaws seem to be incentivizing short-term-thinking and negative externalities. When a company flexes morals that appear at odds with short term profit (e.g. Twitter), I tend to assume they are actually acting out of self-interest but are better able to grasp the long vs. short-term incentives, for whatever reason.

You make a good point about how to actually enforce this. Apparently, Washington state did ban political ads on Facebook. As a testing ground for such a policy, the results haven't been great.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/31/20941917/twitter-politic...

HOWEVER, this appears to me as a regulation failure. We know Facebook doesn't want the ban, so their motivation to comply is limited to the clarity and sharpness of the teeth of the legislation. And they aren't very sharp.

Regarding:

> Twitter hasn’t actually banned political ads, they’ve just used a definition that makes it easy for them to claim to have done so.

I don't agree with painting Twitter as just wanting to "claim" they have done so. They appear to be making a true good-faith effort. Check out their policy:

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/prohibited...

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...

> Is an ad for a climate change organization a political ad? How about an ad for UBI? An ad for a local Catholic Church? An ad about farming subsidies? An ad for birth control?

For each of these examples, there is a clear way to apply their policy based on the content of the message. Is it perfect? Probably not. Will it totally kneecap political ads (by 80%+)? I believe it will.

> All of these are one step away from direct advertisements for candidates and are very political topics for many people.

I would argue that your point is too academic. If political ads are reduced by 80%, even though there are still political-adjacent ads (that aren't funded by a political group and don't reference a candidate or initiative), then the policy would be a wild success.

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