Facebook to let users turn off political adverts | Hacker News Reader

Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

bbc.co.uk

543 pointsblopeur478 comments

I'd also love a feature that lets me block non-advertising political content.

A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That's not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc.

Some people push it so far that the solution of unfriending them is easy. But not everybody is so egregious that I want the nuclear option. (For example, relatives who are vocal about politics.)

Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

Maybe this would even go beyond making my own feed better. If enough people feel the same, maybe it would cut down on the audience size and reduce people's temptation to get on a soapbox.

What is political content? Is news about the protests political? Is a statement by the president? Is a new law going in to effect political? Is someone commenting about wearing masks political?

> Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.

Honestly, it would be fine to just block re-shares of posts from politicians and the sorts of account that literally only talk politics.

> I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.

You are over-thinking this. Just filtering obvious political stuff would be a massive help:

- Mentions of politicians

- Key words: Liberal, Conservative, Right-wing, etc etc

- Material re-shared from political parties/ candidates/ movements.

Just that would be a giant help. Allowing users to set their own filters would be a massive help.

None of this makes Facebook money though so it won't happen.

Perhaps put a list of check boxes for political topics and let people choose. Labeling topics by activity in news sources (say, in combination with other known political terms or authors) can help discover the list mechanically.

Social Fixer is a browser extension that provides filters for Facebook. I used it during elections period and it’s great. My current solution is to not use Facebook at all, and I got say it’s pretty neat :P

What is political itself is political.

Is LGBT political? Is support for immigration political. Is climate change political? Is COVID-19 political?

Trying to be impartial here is a fool's game.

Believe it or not, there are times in my life where I'm not interested in hearing more about LGBT rights, immigration, covid-19, or climate change.

Absolutely, I want to know what people I care about are up to. I don't want my entire social world to turn into hot takes.

There are important issues, absolutely. But my personal relationships with other humans are not based on their hot takes on those issues.

Maybe the best move is simply to not play the game. FB is clearly focusing on their customers, the ad-buyers and influencers.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I've been thinking so often lately, that I'd really just like to know what's happening in my loved ones' lives, and not see everyone airing their amateur political opinions. But I think the reality is that these sorts of things are often a gray area. For example, I don't want to hear everyone's opinion about the riots in America. But my sister lives in Minneapolis and the building next to her house was burned down. I want to know about that. And while generally I don't want to hear heated debates about laws and court decisions, I've got LGBTQ family members and when SCOTUS makes decisions affecting their lives, I want to know about it. But what I do and don't want to know about is not an easy thing to filter. Even my closest friends probably wouldn't be able to accurately filter what I do and don't want to know about. I highly doubt that an algorithm tuned to optimize engagement and profit is really going to be able to accurately filter what I want to know about either. I've resorted to muting anyone who posts anything about politics, and doing things the old fashioned way and calling people to hear what's new in their lives.

> I'd also love a feature that lets me block non-advertising political content.

I would just prefer an option where I only saw content my friends actually took the time to post themselves. I don't want politics, memes, or other trendy bullshit, just their words, pictures, or even links they personally took the time to clip and paste. If I want news or entertainment, I can find that myself, but Facebook is currently the single best place for me to connect to a bunch of my friends and I'd love to see that without all the other bullshit.

Of course that's not what makes FB money so it'll never happen, which is why I just stopped using it entirely. (Well that plus the fact that it's run by a bunch of sociopaths)

I totally agree with you. I think what's killing Facebook are the endless reposts, just show me original content, please.

I was working on a script to hide shared posts, but it broke after the last update. Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?

> Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?

This sounds way to time consuming to me for way too little reward.

My approach has been to make a “politics” friend list, and put people on it when they post political things. Then I share political stuff with that list. So if I haven't seen political stuff from you, you shouldn't see it from me.

For people who just share too much, besides the nuclear option or unfriending or unfollowing, I like the 30 day mute.

A simple naive bayesian text classifier (e.g. A Plan for Spam) run client-side as a userscript should be more than capable of doing what you want. It would be nice if websites had this sort of client-side filtering feature built in, fully controlled by the user, for transparency reasons.

You can use an ad blocker to filter out html elements that contain keywords or hashtags that are often used in the types of posts you don't want to see. Not a perfect solution, but an ok solution.

Anecdotally, I was able to achieve this by _never_ interacting with political content on FB. That, or nobody in my network posts it (unlikely). But I never see political posts on my newsfeed.

I would pay money for a feature like this

It's a good feature from an individual perspective. It's not a good feature if you don't like cultural bubbles forming. Democrats will block Republican ads, Republicans will block Democrat ads - will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

I find this focus (attack?) on political advertising on social media platforms by traditional media companies to be self-serving and hypocritical. The craziest political ads have been run on local TV and newspapers for decades [1] and everyone just accepted it as part of a normal political discourse ... but now there is a concentrated effort to prevent or "fact check" political ads on Facebook and Twitter. Why? I'm sure it has nothing to do with billions spent on political ads (revenue that will go to traditional media outlets if it can't be spent on social media), nor anything to do with the pro-Democratic party bias in almost all traditional media.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA

> Republicans will block Democrat ads - will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

The piece indicates that there will be an option off political ads entirely, not to block political ads by partisan affiliation. (The latter is both more complex to even superficially inplement and would be rather ineffective because SuperPAC ads are formally unaffiliated with either parties or candidates.)

Also FYI: The adjective for “Associated with the Democratic Party” is “Democratic”, just like the adjective in the party name. “Democrat” is the noun form.

EDIT: I'm going to quote and respond to a dead reply, because it makes a common point which deserves a response rather than downvoting to oblivion:

> Yes, but Republicans consistently use the term 'Democrat' instead of 'Democratic' because they don't want to imply that Democrats have a connection to the concept of Democracy.

> It's a shibboleth; folks who instinctively say "Democrat" are reliably far-right.

While this is correct as to the origin and the tactical employment of the usage, it is not a reliable indicator because lots of people who aren't far-right or Republican partisans are exposed to media in which far-right (or at least solidly Republican partisan) voices which embody this tactic are common and don't realize that is what it is, and adopt the pattern from that source.

The ones who persist after correction are doing it intentionally and tactically, though.

I don't think it's always a shibboleth, many people use Democrat as the demonym adjective form because of the obvious confusion otherwise. Seen it both ways.

> Yes, but Republicans consistently use the term 'Democrat' instead of 'Democratic' because they don't want to imply that Democrats have a connection to the concept of Democracy

If true that's petty, but on the other hand, is the Democratic party actually any more "democratic" than the Republican party? (current president's authoritarian tendencies notwithstanding)

Yes, but Republicans consistently use the term 'Democrat' instead of 'Democratic' because they don't want to imply that Democrats have a connection to the concept of Democracy.

It's a shibboleth; folks who instinctively say "Democrat" are reliably far-right.

You can target Facebook ads with surgical precision to manipulate people exactly the way you want. This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did.

You cannot target people with such precision in traditional advertising.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say social media advertising and data collection is the biggest risk to democracy that we have ever faced.

The targeted precision really is what's different. Your candidate can be N different single-issue candidates in a way that's just not possible without precise targeting.

The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed.

In my opinion, surgically precise targeting was not the problem with Cambridge Analytica. The problems were:

1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms.

2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service.

I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging.

As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.

I would say that social media generally is the biggest threat.

However, I find it hard to believe that ads are even remotely the real problem (though they're part of it). They're not nearly as effective at influencing people as friends/journalists/etc and the methods social media uses to reward and elevate angry, tribal content. An endless stream of confirmation bias and strawmen, mostly from other users. Ads are a small part of that river, more likely to be ignored/blocked and more likely to be understood as fiction vs other content. They do have an effect of course, but it seems to be greatly overstated.

Also remember the unprecedented $500M ad experiment Bloomberg ran to little effect. Would $50B even have done the trick? I would bet not.

I think you might want to brush up on more recent news, because by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated.

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/

From the article:

“But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”

The other thing that is notable about that kind of precise targetting is that nobody other than the recipients and the advertiser know these ads exist and what their contents were.

I wonder what the result would be if they disabled any kind of targeting for political ads (or massively limited it, to targeting per-state).

Democracy is inherently broken if you think people can be controlled in this way.

Because voters are too stupid to tell fact from fiction, and need their betters to protect them from misinformation and make sure they are only exposed to approved viewpoints?

>This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did

The impact of Cambridge Analytica is so overstated that it crosses into hyperbole. They were a bunch of clowns with minimal impact that got magnified to a status of super-villain because you could use them to club Trump over the head with. And let's not lose sight of the big picture, namely before Trump accidentally won (yes, accidentally and barely), the Trump campaign was seen (correctly) as a total disorganized disaster and one of the biggest clown-shows in modern political campaigns ... and yet they were at the same time these nefarious puppet masters using modern high-tech technology to manipulate voters and ultimately skew the election.

> Democrats will block Republican ads, Republicans will block Democrat ads

I could be wrong, but it sounds like you can just turn off all political ads, not those from specific parties.

Interestingly, it seems like if you have solidly made up your mind, you should block your own party's ads to save the unnecessary ad spend. Similarly, you should not block the other party's ads to cause them to waste ad dollars.

Not to mention you already could accomplish this by blocking ads from those specific parties... just like you could block ads from a company.

One difference is that there’s less transparency with digital ads. They can be targeted at much smaller groups of people so you may see quite different ads from your neighbour. It seems much harder to talk to other people about the ads as you are less likely to be seeing the same things, and it seems much harder for their to be a public debate when one side may not even know the arguments being made by the other

You are saying this as if those ads state facts and stick to the issues. Politics in the US is a mess. Party politics makes absolutely no sense to me. My trust in what they have to say, particularly on social media, is nil. Those ads will be turned off.

I have never have, nor never will, vote along party lines. I am, proudly, unaffiliated.

If you want to be effective and create change, you need to engage with party politics and push one (or both?) parties in a particular direction.

Voting in party primaries and advocating for change within parties, given the state of affairs in US politics, is a better bet for effective change than maintaining a stance of moral purity.

>Politics in the US is a mess.

Why would you want it any other way? Democracy is messy.

>You are saying this as if those ads state facts and stick to the issues

I'm not saying that at all, but I will say this, political discourse is never about facts and policy. Same with activism. Do you think activists stick to facts and data to prove their case? Almost never. Do you think any housing activists that push 'rent control' as a partial solution to homelessness, care that 'rent control' as a policy has been objectively an abject failure and doesn't actually solve the issue at hand? Politics are emotion-driven and things like 'emotional trust' will outweigh any policy or fact-based discussion.

When you see a bad ad on TV, you might talk about it with your spouse or kids. When you see a bad ad on Facebook, you argue with 1000 strangers.

I deactivated my Facebook account 6 months ago or so for precisely that reason. I was in a "community group" for my neighbourhood and every little thing would descend into an argument you would never have if you were talking in person. For example, a person complained that his neighbour was shoveling the snow from his sidewalk onto the road instead of his yard. Huge 40 person argument began. People act different online.

> Democrats will block Republican ads, Republicans will block Democrat ads - will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

The article doesn't say they'll allow partisan choice about what to block. Just that they'll give you a bubble disallowing "political" ads. I think the big quibble is how they define "political", but the scenario you're imagining doesn't exist.

And FWIW: maybe all those ads in the Atlantic video you posted are "crazy". Very few of them (none that I saw) are lies. It's routine for a median Facebook user to be faced with screenfulls of misinformation. Zuckerberg was challenged about this directly, and stated that it wasn't his job to act as a gatekeeper.

Whether it's a good feature for your or not, that's your opinion and choice.

Personally I find Facebook to be unusable and I'm close to deleting my account. I couldn't care less about information bubbles, I basically started unfollowing all acquaintances that frequently post political articles.

I'm really sick of it and given Facebook's feed is screwed anyway, I would like the option of completely filtering out posts on certain topics, such as politics. Alas Facebook doesn't even give the option of censoring words from that stupid timeline.

It can be one motive but it's not the only one. Can be the driver for a lot of actors attacking social media but we can't deny that social media has enabled a lot of new techniques for reaching an audience in a much easier and rapid platform than ever before. Those techniques have been twisted into the range of untruthfulness that we couldn't have seen before in the old media because moderation was much more strict (and papers depended on some kind of respectability).

The closest we had to this in the past were tabloids but people could more easily categorise those than the thousands of "Truth News Online"-esque articles peddled on social media. It's an extreme torrent of an old issue, we scaled it up.

Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...

So yes, money might be a shady motive behind this hunt but there is also quite a lot of damage that we haven't yet found a way to deal with. And it's causing very real problems, in real life, right now.

Not that these problems were caused directly by social media but they are adding fuel to the fire and it only seems to be increasing now when having checks on them becomes another divisive subject and added as another single-issue partisan bullshit.

> Those techniques have been twisted into the range of untruthfulness that we couldn't have seen before in the old media because moderation was much more strict (and papers depended on some kind of respectability).

That's not even remotely true. The Atlantic put together snippets of political ads over decades [1]. It's pretty crazy stuff. The local stuff, just from personal memory, was even crazier, frequently asserting the equivalent of the opposition being murderers.

>Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...

The problem is that even that perspective is your personal bias which you're using to justify censorship. The other side is bad and lying and therefore they wrong so they shouldn't be allowed to speak.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA

> the pro-Democratic party bias in almost all traditional media

I often see this presented as a given, but it doesn't ring true to me. Is there some evidence or research I'm missing showing that traditional media is biased toward the Democratic party?

I think what people tend to mean is national media not necessarily local news sources.

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC tend to favor the Democratic Party. While Fox News tends to favor the Republican Party.

Some of the largest newspapers NYTimes, LA Times, Washington Post, etc tend to favor the Democratic Party. There are a few that tend to support the Republican Party.

When you look at the endorsements by newspapers and magazines you will see that it is overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic Party [0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

Quite the opposite, when you consider how the Sinclair Broadcast group is the largest owner of local broadcast stations, where most people get their news, and force their affiliates to run certain conservative segments.

Then, consider how owners of 3 of the top 4 most circulated newspapers in the US are conservative: Frank Gannett and News Corp (which owns 2!).

IMO political ads should be banned from all platforms, as a law. It is insane that candidates who have more money and funding will in turn have more reach. This is antidemocratic.

The problem isn't the cultural bubbles; the problem is that there are apparently only two bubbles, which quickly boils down to "you're with us or you're against us". This is not a technological problem or a filter bubble problem, but a core issue with how US politics is currently organized.

With sweeping political reform, you can have dozens of parties active, each representing a much more fine-grained selection of the US population.

That way, one can be extreme-right and vote for the KKK party instead of the current Republicans which may be too mild for their liking; they'll be represented in the government (and outed for being a racist) and feel like their vote counts, but their influence will be marginalized.

There'll be a room for a Democrats-like party headed by Clinton and/or Biden, and another one more liberal / socialist headed by Sanders. It gives more space for more nuanced policies, and it gives more room for different opinions (whereas the current one is with us or against us, and if you're not cool enough your candidacy has no chance).

The current US electoral system makes this practically impossible. You'd need widespread adoption of PR or similar. A FPTP system, like nearly all US states use, essentially ensures that there will only be two viable parties (there are occasional cases where such systems lead to a 2.5 party system for historical reasons, as with the UK's Liberal Democrats, descendants of the defunct Liberal Party, one of the previous two parties).

The US would require multiple votes as well to really succeed at this. For example in Germany a person has 2 votes, and that enables them to perhaps use one vote to support a moderate-left party like SPD who they want to be a strong opposition party, but then at the same time vote for a far-right party like AfD.

Maybe the voter's issue is the power of CDU? Maybe they're just anti-establishment? Maybe they're just voting on specific issues?

Who knows, but it's way better than only being able to put your stamp on one party, and gives a little more negotiating power to the smaller parties when forming coalitions.

>It's not a good feature if you don't like cultural bubbles forming.

I agree with that, but I don't think that advertising will meaningfully impact that. From what I gather political advertising isn't used to change opinions of opposition, it's precisely targeted. It's used to help sway undecided and make your own vote base actually register for voting and vote. People from groups with differing opinions already haven't been seeing the advertisement.

Targeted advertising literally made propaganda 10 times cheaper. This means I can spare a few bucks and target whatever sh*t I want at whoever I like. I don't need to a big business with a big budget. Most orgs who have an agenda can easily throw a few thousand dollars to push a narrative. Not all of them can afford a TV ad at Prime time (at least TV ad on a network anyone is watching).

How many Facebook ads even target people in the opposite party? I have only seen fundraising ads for Democrats. The ads seem to be reinforcing cultural bubbles.

It seems like targeting people committed to the other side wouldn't be a good use of campaign funds? With low voter participation rates, there is a lot more to be gained from increasing turnout for your own side.

In 2016, I saw ads for both D's and R's running for president and senate.

The primary elections aren't totally over yet. I'll bet come November you have a different experience.

I am mildly skeptical that disabling advertising will have the effect you worry about.

Anecdotally, I am more likely to be charitable and curious about someone else's views if I'm not surrounded by a lot of appeals to emotion or party loyalty. Watching Republican/Democrat ads doesn't make me more sympathetic to either party, often it's the opposite. Get rid of all of the ads comparing Nancy Pelosi to the devil, and I'll be more likely to engage with the actual issues being discussed. Modern political advertising seems specifically designed to push me into more tribal attitudes.

I won't comment on banning things, but blocking political ads on a personal level may be healthy for at least some people. It's not exactly hard to find political arguments if you search for them. And if you do search for them, you're more likely to engage with people who actually know what they're talking about, instead of conspiracy theorists on Facebook.

It's the same attitude of, 'if you want to learn Javascript, there are better ways you can spend your time than reading random rants online about the death of the web.' If you want to learn conservatism/liberalism/socialism, there are better sources than a Facebook ad.

>>It's not a good feature if you don't like cultural bubbles forming.

I think you'll find the horse has bolted on that.

You'll not catch me dead on Facebook, ever. But the feature to turn off political ads sounds great.

>will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

We've lived in this world since 2016, if not earlier. The question is how to proceed from here.

> will that lead to a better world when Republicans can't reach Democrat voters or vice versa?

That entirely depends on whether you think voter suppression ads are fair-play or not

I have never seen a Republican or conservative political ad on Facebook. This hypothetical bubble already exists.

The problem is if you turn off all ads, you won't see any alternative points. I don't need Biden ads because I already will vote for Biden, so I turn off political ads. That's it I'm back in my bubble.

This is a cop-out for actually having to verify/review political ads.

Zuckerburg is really really good at the art of seeming like he is progressive but is empirically horrible for society.

> The problem is if you turn off all ads, you won't see any alternative points.

That's ridiculous, it's not as though Facebook ads are the only source of political information in America. Even on facebook specifically that's not true; everybody's Facebook wall will still be packed to the brim with their friends, family and neighbors still talking about politics. We're talking about politics right now, despite there not being any paid promotional material present in this thread.

Advertisers simply do not fill the vital social role you seem to attribute to them.

Zuckerburg is really really good at the art of seeming like he is progressive but is empirically horrible for society.

Is he good at the art of seeming progressive?

He's hosted fundraisers for Chris Christie, his lobbying group FWD.us had created a GOP-led spin off called "Americans for a Conservative Direction" that supported the keystone XL pipeline, and the decidedly non-progressive politicians Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

So when I hear people say stuff like "Facebook has a liberal bias" or that Zuckerberg himself is progressive, I'm genuinely puzzled.

Having of all people FB to be your arbiter of truth of what is a fact based political ad vs a non-fact based political ad sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

What we perceive as fact is actually something derived from a lot of open discourse based on a lot of evidence. Removing open discourse based on whether the discourse is fact based is circular reasoning and a chicken & egg problem. It's not fact check, it just becomes outright censorship.

I was in the social media team of one of the Democratic presidential candidates. I agree with you.

It's my belief that if you want to give a chance to lesser known candidates who are not backed by millionaires and powerful insiders, Facebook was the last option available.

I believe Facebook was one of the last services available to make our democracy more democratic.

I think this move by Facebook will make it so much harder for smaller candidates to have a chance now.

I know there is this perception that without Facebook ads Trump would have not won. I don't believe that at all.

I think Trump won first because of NBC and then because of CNN, ABC, etc. than because of any Facebook ads. Allow me to explain:

A - It was NBC that gave Trump years of national TV exposure and created this myth of this business mogul and business guru with his TV show the Apprentice. So people believed "Make America Great Again" was possible.

B - Trump got about $5billion in free media [0]. Because Trump and all his statements captured so much interests.

C - In 2016 election, about 8.5 million people who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump and about 2.5 million of 2012 Romney voters voted for Hillary [1].

These 8.5 million 2012 Obama voters may or may not have been Fox viewers and as likely watched CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, local news (which are all affiliated).

Did you know the Democratic party will cancel working with you as an agency or entity if you work with any candidates that challenge any incumbents? [2]. Basically if you are a professional or entity doing email campaigns or other work and if you work for any non-incumbent you're basically gone and blacklisted. Are we okay with this? Facebook made it so easy for much smaller candidates with little resources to challenge the incumbents. Now this path is gone.

BTW, in the past 4 years or so Republicans have invested and built this enormousness voter database with email, sms and phone number targeting. I've seen screenshots of it. There are other entity who have built something similar at the DNC or will offer one to the Democrats at the right price. There is so much data out there outside of Facebook to target you.

If a candidate has the budget and all the resources he/she/they don't need facebook to get that kind of targeting.

I had the opportunity to evaluate various vendors and their pitches. What's available now out there outside of facebook is rather scary. Any candidate with large budget can target the audience they want it's the smaller ones who will be eliminated by this change.

Lastly, Trump won because of the message. Trump actually ran economically on the left of Hillary and socially on her right.

The kind of stuff like union jobs/workers protection, which used to be the platform of Democrats is what Trump ran on. Everyone talked about the wall, and racism. But many Americans who have been gradually marginalized and seeing every product that used to be made in USA was now coming from China and blaming their jobs lost to Mexico because of NAFTA wanted to hear Trump's message. I know for us in the Bay Area or in NY, this doesn't matter, but I believe it's because we are out of touch with the rest of the country. This is why I had predicted Trump win during GOP primary and his national win. I spoke with random people in various parts of the country. Once they felt comfortable with you, they had a positive view of Trump and how he would somehow come and rescue them. He fooled them, but the message resonated and Trump got $5 billion in free media coverage. That's why he won, because of the places like NBC, CNN, FOX, etc.

You can talk about the small narrow of victory by which Trump won places like Michigan and if Facebook wasn't there he would have not won. I'm not sure about that at all. I think this facebook narrative distracts from the bigger picture, which Trump won on the message that years ago was part of the Democratic platform and he got his message across for free using the mainstream media.

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[1] http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2019/03/22/house-democratic-leaders...

The kind of stuff like union jobs/workers protection, which used to be the platform of Democrats is what Trump ran on.

Interesting to see what happens in the upcoming election since he failed to deliver worker protection (but found plenty of time to let pro-corporate judges get more power).

I don't think you can equate FB and traditional media and then honestly ponder why people are upset. Traditional media ads weren't paid for in rubles by Putin's agents. Traditional ads weren't being approved by the most dangerous CEO in modern times. Traditional media didn't lead to the most terrible president in history. Clearly we are in a different world than the strawman traditional media, FB is a whole new monstrosity.

Question: how many rubles were used to pay for US political ads in the 2016 election?

It's "Democratic" not "Democrat". Democratic ads. Democratic voters. Democratic party. "Democrat" is a noun. It is used by Republicans as an adjective with the intent to be belittling and pejorative. It's like calling a black man "boy". Don't do it.

I wonder if it'll be a obscurely named toggle hidden away in a settings sub page somewhere just so they can say they've offered the option.

Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.

Not only hidden away, but one will have to set this option every time the page refreshes, as with time ordering of timeline. That latter behavior nullified FB usability for me, not using for 2+ years and happy. Every time when come back just run away scary of the political trash bin it has become.

There are browser extensions for that

Facebook is the least of our worries. We need a system where running a successful political campaign does not depend on how much money you bring. Each candidate should have the same budget and so equal amount of exposure.

I don't know how you do this fairly without infringing on non-political candidates right to free speech.

It seems a little nuts that I'm not allowed to endorse my preferred candidate because my endorsement has value and my candidate hit their cap.

Simple. Suspend the right to loud forms of free speech during political campaigns.

Or have an independent panel measure the media exposure of each candidate. Then compensate them accordingly.

True. And sadly the most basic solutions rarely get air time anywhere.

Just as I rarely see petitions for "equal and free advertising for all candidates" I rarely see "hold authorities accountable for their actions". Sure there's related arguments among the clammer, but never hear it stated that simply.

> I wonder if it'll be a obscurely named toggle hidden away in a settings sub page somewhere just so they can say they've offered the option.

Wouldn't that disproportionately remove only young urban democrats from political advertising?

also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?

Facebook is going to make a staggering amount of money up until November this year in the US. That's why its not getting airplay in the states.

> Wouldn't that disproportionately remove only young urban democrats from political advertising?

If that were the case, it might actually be beneficial to Democrats since they wouldn't waste money advertising to those people meanwhile Republicans wouldn't be able to change their minds with advertising.

Or it could go the other way, and inability to constantly be reminding those people how great the dems are and how important it is to vote means the turnout will be lower among those who turned off ads than if they hadn't been able to.

(And I agree with everyone saying that FB cares more about making bank from the election than about actually improving the situation.)

I don't really understand the argument that these ads have value to the people that turn them off. You might be able to make a case that the ads have some good by passively informing people and getting your message out but anyone who's turning them off I would imagine has pretty much made up their mind.

> also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?

Well, did you read the first two sentences of the article?

> Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters.

The USA Today article is easily located: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-v...

My conclusion is that Hacker News has a bias in favor of a news source like the BBC over a news source like USA Today which is strong enough to overcome USA Today having the original story yet have the BBC article be the one voted up.

I’m not a statistician, but I know my internet memes, and the one that comes to mind is, “n=1.”

Especially considering that there are a LOT of factors driving why one of many articles describing the same thing would get upvoted. Choice of headline and time of day come to mind as factors that sometimes outweigh “original source.”

My own n=handful experience is that I can sometimes post one of my own essays, get crickets, and then it will get a second chance, and BOOM, front page.

At least one of those times, the essay has gotten traction elsewhere, like Twitter and Reddit, so one possible explanation is that sometimes people upvote articles about a subject they have seen elsewhere.

If that were the case, it would favour secondary articles over the original.

The overwhelming reason for things like that is randomness. If you answered 'randomness' every time such a question arises, you'd probably have a better mental model of HN than maybe anybody (us included). But of course that's deeply unsatisfying, so we invent stories instead. Randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative. I'm not putting you down—we all do this.

I think a moderator took a look at the two articles and felt like the BBC one was a bit more neutral, while the USA Today one was a bit more press-releasey, so didn't change the URL. I haven't looked at either article; I'm just reporting how we tend to consider these things.

> Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default

This means the revenue KPI of the ads team would go down right? So will never happen.

It's probably worth noting that if you were running an online ads platform, revenue probably wouldn't be what you'd optimise for. You'd be better off optimising for an event that advertisers will pay you for.

no doubt it'll keep "accidentally" getting switched back on

In my experience, if it's just an option on a settings page somewhere, virtually nobody will change it in practice. So if that's what they do and it's still enabled by default, this could be completely ineffective - but provide some political cover for them.

They would not even need to hide it, the fact that it is an optin feature already means that most people won't ever turn it off and therefore be exposed to said political messaging even when the idea is for them to not be

I see where they are coming from, but this seems backwards to me. I would like to block all commercial ads, but it seems really important to me that people see political ads. Granted, the current campaigns in the US are messed up and most ads look like propaganda, but this is a narrow view of what politics can be.

Because on the other hand, as a political activist I know how incredibly hard it is to get your message out there. I mean just the hard facts that people might not know about, and our suggested solutions.

The internet and social media provides a slightly leveled playing field: Sure a small social movement can never compete against a billion dollar campaign, but this is a pareto-law distribution where they quickly hit diminishing returns. With a few well timed Twitter posts I hand can reach thousands of people. In the pre-digital world, we would have had to print thousands of flyers, tried to get into newspapers etc..

I find it frustrating and damaging to democracy that politics is viewed as something dirty. Politics should be just a domain of problem solving and discussion like programming, home improvement, or cooking - except that everybody should have a say since it affects everybody. Why do we assume everybody in politics has sinister intentions?

It's really important to you that other people see what kinds of ads you want them to see.

I just have to take a step back from this for a second, because I really, really dislike the concept that other people have decided that I need to be politically educated (and through Facebook ads, no less). Goodness. If you wish to view political ads, or adds for dog hair brushes, by all means, go for it. Do not attempt to force me to do so.

If you want to know where the assumption of sinister intentions comes from, read your comment again: you want to decide what I see.

Maybe this is a cultural difference. I lived in Germany for a long time, and here "political education" ("politische bildung") is something you get in school (e.g. as part of history lessons). This is probably a result of experiencing the decline of democracy, and the rise of fascism. Note this is not about partisanal topics, but about how the separation of powers work, federalism, what happens with your taxes, and even complex things like monetary policy (if you take certain classes).

I think the idea to educate the people on general political issues is not too foreign to the US, at least I've seen many PSAs there, which they don't have over here.

The idea is not to force anybody to watch anything. My idea would be akin to putting up an informational poster next to an advertizing poster outside. But I've made the experience that in many places you literally can't put a billboard up or run a radio ad if it has political / "world-view-based" content - such as talking about unions, rent control, atheism etc. - whereas it is fine to advertize beer or dog hair brushes or any other product.

Conversely, now many platforms actually "force" you to sit through an ad before you get to your content. Tell me, why is it OK if that clip is an ad for some random beauty product, but sinister if it is about the pros or cons of wind energy?

What I'm envisioning is not "forcing" anybody to view anything, but for example changing the display algorithms of social media. Let 10 percent or so be an unbiased selection of posts showing different world views. I'm sure the text analysis algorithms could provide that.

But yeah, I'd find it beneficial for society if I could get more eyeballs on non-commercial, important-for-society topics. This is the same reason I occasionally hang up a poster in a public place. And I honestly believe it is good if someone passes by my poster and reads it on their way to work. (They are also free to ignore it!)

And so I ask the question which is always the test: how would you feel about the algorithm including "information" which is directly opposed to your personal stance. Imagine a "CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT REAL" poster. Would that also be acceptable? That is, after all, the world view of some.

My guess is that you would answer no to that, that such a thing would not be permitted. And so it begins ... who vets such a thing? And we are back to the issue of making Facebook (or anyone else) responsible for some kind of monitoring of what is and is not allowed.

> Maybe this is a cultural difference. I lived in Germany for a long time, and here "political education" ("politische bildung") is something you get in school (e.g. as part of history lessons).... Note this is not about partisanal topics, but about how the separation of powers work, federalism, what happens with your taxes, and even complex things like monetary policy (if you take certain classes).

Those kinds of classes exist in the US. In my high school the course was called "Government," but I think it's sometimes called "Civics." It was only one semester, but I'm pretty sure the basics were touched on in Social Studies classes in younger grades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_education_in_the_United_...

> I find it frustrating and damaging to democracy that politics is viewed as something dirty. Politics should be just a domain of problem solving and discussion like programming, home improvement, or cooking - except that everybody should have a say since it affects everybody. Why do we assume everybody in politics has sinister intentions?

Because politics, at least at the top levels, has been perverted by lobbying.

Your ideal of politics seems to be that of people trying to figure out what choices and compromises need to be made. I'm sure most politicians start out like that, but once they get to office, they see that fundraising for reelection is their #1 goal, full stop.

> they see that fundraising for reelection is their #1 goal, full stop.

A minor nit pick: I think you're correct that reelection is their #1 goal, but fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically.

>fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically.

False, see Cambridge Analytica.

In other words, politics is dirty because the people who play dirty get an advantage, which means only the people who play dirty can stay competitive.

I'm going to get in trouble for saying this too often but why do Americans persistently complain about lobbying until an election when they suddenly forget that and instead vote for whoever from their favorite party spends the most money, much of which came from lobbyists? If you don't want lobbying, then stop voting for it!

I know people have a mindset of wanting to be on the winning team and not waste their vote on somebody who can't possibly win because they didn't spend enough money, but if that's really more important to you than lobbying, then stop complaining - you're getting what you want at the expense of something you want less. Maybe you can't have your cake and eat it too in this situation.

> Why do we assume everybody in politics has sinister intentions?

Over the last 30+ years I've seen both parties flip flop on foreign military intervention, gay marriage, states rights, big government, judicial appointments, filibusters, corporate bailouts, government surveillance, militarizing the police, etc. and the list goes on. Both parties have been rhetorically and legislatively on both sides of these issues depending on their position of power.

The one thing that is consistent is that the two parties blame each other and the party that's out of power tries to complain and obstruct until they get back in power.

So, after a while it is easy to look at millions of donations following in to influence elections and the flip flop of positions and be skeptical of anyone who thinks they can affect change without changing the way government and elections ultimately work.

@captainmuon I appreciate your sentiment, that viewing politics through a dirty lens is a disservice to democracy.

But it is exceptionally difficult to get past the constant battle for share of voice, for power, my tribe vs. your tribe, and down to the brass tacks of problem solving.

Instead of advertisements, then, it seems like they should do something like politics.facebook.com which includes interviews with candidates, breakdowns of candidate platforms and affiliations, and essays by candidates.

Ads are just an opportunity to sling more mud and incite rage. I want to see some content that I as a voter can actually inform my opinion with. Fair, even, and well-organized to support voters.

Not only that, but it moves people toward having an educated opinion, not getting all gassed up on rage-bait.

“I would like to block all commercial ads, but it seems really important to me that people see political ads.“

At least in the US political ads are full of negativity, distortion and wrong “facts” so I don’t think they contribute at all to a healthy discussion. I think the country would be better off if it severely limited all political advertising. Won’t happen because of first amendment though.

> ... this seems backwards to me.

Exactly. I wouldn't mind seeing the actual ads, and getting a first-hand impression on what the candidates are campaigning on. What I do NOT want to see -- which is why I quit Facebook -- are the insane and conspiratorial comments and posts ABOUT the political ads.

twitter only reaches the masses because the press relays the tweets. they only do this when it aligns with the story they want to deliver.

the vast majority of what passes through twitter is wholly unnoticed by the public if not many of those who use the service.

the idea of blocking political based advertisements is pretty much defeated by news stories of which many are political.

I am all just for putting a banner, border, or cigarette style label, on all ads with the ability to click anywhere on the border to hide that ad permanently.

Everyone in politics has an agenda.

Not everyone in politics is willing to be honest about what that agenda is, and rarely are they held accountable for misinformation used in pursuit of that agenda.

Exactly why I should listen to spin doctor ads?

Facebook has a really interesting feature that I haven’t seen in Twitter, Google, or others. I can block all ads from a page.

Whenever I see a political ad, I can choose “don’t show me any more ads from XXX” and it actually works. This was a godsend during the primary and I wish was available in other platforms.

I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.

I actually took this a step further and un-followed all of my friends. It took me more than a few hundred clicks, but Facebook now shows me a completely empty news feed. There's no ads either, although I'm not sure if that's because of uBlock Origin or if it's because there's not enough posts to stick ads in-between.

As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...

At that point, why not just use (Facebook) Messenger and stop using the main website altogether? Messenger gives you the benefit of a Rolodex without subjecting you to the normal feed. Facebook did a pretty good job of cleaning up bloat from Messenger recently too.

Why doesn't Google do it? They already have gmail and chrome, I could see Googledex heavily populated from their existing data.

They tried with Google+, there's was nothing stopping people from using Google to socialize, no-one wants to.

isn't Google Contacts a digital Rolodex? What you're describing sounds like white pages.

You can literally block an account when you see an ad on twitter and never see anything from them. If you do it enough you stop seeing almost any ads from anyone in my experience.

What are you talking about? Twitter lets you block advertiser accounts. I would say Twitter is better about it, because they just let me block the account. Facebook makes (or rather, used to make) me go through several steps of "are you sure? wouldn't you rather just hide this person? what if you asked them nicely first?" bullshit.

And after doing it a few times (maybe two dozen?), suddenly the block feature was gone completely. I have hundreds of accounts blocked on Twitter.

In Twitter, I can block or mute the account that promoted the ad, but that turns off all messaging. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but if I block an advertiser on Facebook, I can still see non-ads.

Yeah, but other messages from an advertiser are still ads, even if they aren't "ads" that they paid Facebook for, so I don't want to see those, either.

It works for regular posts too. I hide all posts from major and minor news sources and eliminates almost all political commentary from my Facebook feed.

With twitter you can block the user that prompoted the tweet and you won't see any tweets, promoted or other wise from them.

Doesn't such a feature contribute to the creation of echo chambers? It's hard to tell when it comes to something like ads as they usually aren't a great source of information.

I suppose it does, but I feel like echo chambers are more dangerous when people don't necessarily realize they've entered one (e.g. when all of your FB friends only share posts centered around a particular political view).

I feel like there's less danger here since one needs to manually click that they don't want to see a particular type of content

I don't really want my political views enforced or challenged on Facebook, its really not the place for it.

Why should i have to when all i want is a C rate messenger service?

Echo chambers are deliberately created by the platform according to what they think will keep the user on the site. It is fundamentally anti-user. This is the person self-selecting what they want to see. It's a very different thing.

A little. But I don’t think watching ads helps break down echo chambers. I don’t think ads aren’t genuine messaging so I can live without seeing a post from Coke or Joe Biden 5 times in my feed.

Echo chambers are a bit of a myth. If anything, social media has given more awareness of what the other side is up to than was previously the case.

It's nice you can do that, but Facebook has 19 million other ads they're happy to show.... so it's still crap if you see any ads.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just use ublock origin?

I haven’t figured out how to run ublock on my phone.

On android, one can use facebook in the firefox mobile browser instead of the app. Firefox mobile does allow ublock origin, and it's trivial to add a home shortcut to any web app.

This has other advantages: facebook web site can't ask for a 1000 permissions or to be updated regularly, won't run in the background eating memory and battery and this will limit the disk space it can eat.

You're paying the price with a less integrated UI, yet given the pros, it may be worth it.

ublock hasn't been able to block facebook ads for me for several months at least.

ublock or ublock origin?

I'm a political advertiser as part of my job and one thing most people don't get is that it's not just ELECTORAL ads that Facebook usually is referring to when they're talking about "political" ads. It's, as mentioned in the article, a shorthand for "Ads About Social Issues, Elections or Politics."

So, a few points. First, the obvious, that these things all depend on the extent to which Facebook promotes this "feature." So with that said:

1. I planned a big vote-by-mail (political orgs are concerned about in-person voting bc of COVID) ad campaign to members of my organization. Obviously, it wasn't just Facebook and Instagram, but these will be flagged as politics and less effective than they were previously. Facebook will do its own encouragement to register and to vote, but we know our membership better than Facebook and were crafting campaigns meant to motivate them based on research of what we know works, combined with in-person organizing that's coordinated in a way Facebook would never do. This will also hurt recruitment for members who want to knock on doors.

2. They define social issues as "sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the outcome of an election or result in/relate to existing or proposed legislation." That's an "or" joining those, so it's an incredibly broad category. Expect more to be swept up in this than people in this thread are talking about.

3. The category is so broad that it's going to include most union ad activity. Not just organizing new workers, but let's say a union wants to advertise to its membership of nurses about how they can advocate for N95 masks in the workplace with their employer. It's not actually about public policy, yet Facebook generally will reject this type of ad if it's not categorized as "political." Facebook and Google both have anti-union ad practices, but this is unintentionally going to make it worse.

I'm not necessarily against these policies. Something can be bad in some ways and offset by the good. But if Facebook wants to make the argument about giving users the freedom, let me just ask, how informed are users going to be about what they're blocking? Do they know they might be blocking organizations they are dues-paying members of? Are they allowed to make a distinction between electoral ads and ads that are simply about "debated" topics?

I feel ya, but that's not why I use facebook.

I unfollow friends who mostly post political stuff, even though I generally agree with them. I'm there for pictures, the shared calendar and the messaging. I'll check out memeorandum or NYT for news, and will sometimes read political stuff on reddit or twitter.

To me, I prefer FB as a way to stay connected with friends. I have many other ways to learn about political topics.

I'm sensitive to this, which is why I added those questions to the end.

But let me make create a random example. Oil companies will be able to advertise on Facebook and reach everybody. Environmental organizations talking about oil will not. We don't call the oil companies a political or social issue advertiser, but this disparate treatment for what we consider "social issues" is going to have real-world implications.

You're not there for the ads at all -- you're there for "pictures, the shared calendar and the messaging."

Your response reminds me of Captain Beatty's speech to Montag in Fahrenheit 451:

https://mediadwellers.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/beatty-spe...

I am alright with blocking everything you mentioned across the board. That being said, I have never payed ANY attention to Facebook ads so...

Most of the problems I have had revolve around my own friends, and family posting their thoughts, and ideas about politics tbh.

Indeed -- quite the timely response: Allow people to turn off ads advocating racial justice and equity.

This is a great point. Will a person who turns these ads off even UNDERSTAND that they're not allowing a Black Lives Matter organization to let them know about upcoming events? How will that be explained to the user? The advertiser might only even be sharing the ads with people set up on a recurring contribution to inform them how to stay involved.

Would you be ok with the inverse situation? You could allow ads from an organization you'd support, but you'd also be allowing ads from organizations contrary to your own beliefs?

> Will a person who turns these ads off even UNDERSTAND that they're not allowing

Do you not find this approach patronizing?

I'm not jesting, your comments are well-informed and I am better off for having read them. Still I am curious why is it that you do not believe that people can make reasonable choices about content blocking and correctly interpret "sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the outcome of an election or result in/relate to existing or proposed legislation.".

Facebook wants to be seen to address its perceived interference in politics. Particularly ahead of the upcoming election cycle. It wants to do this without hamstringing its ad-revenue. Let's look at what the measures are -

-an opt-out option for political ads: "The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organisations that have the "Paid for" political disclaimer."

-encouraging voter enfranchisement: "Mr Zuckerberg went on to encourage people who aren't signed up as voters to register in time for the US election in November."

By implementing these Facebook could reasonably make the claim (i.e. at a congressional hearing) that it has consistently and passionately worked to deliver fairness on its platform and protected against manipulation. You can't design against every crisis...but you can design to say you took "reasonable measures" to prevent a crisis. I think that's exactly what these measures are aimed at doing. Someone pointed out in an earlier thread that it's the people who don't think to opt-out that are most in need of "protecting".

This seems to be more than print, radio, and television are doing?

I wish there was a way to turn this off for tv or youtube.

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think its more important to control the flow of political information that is broadcast to their users even if its at a great detriment to their users mental health.

Political ads are explicitly marked, and can be turned off. On the other hand, to classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial. More so, there is no clear universal definition of this. One man's politics is other man's "important announcement". With such ambiguous definitions it is hard to train a ML model for this purpose explicitly.

On the other hand, if you downvote and dismiss political posts regularly, the ML model can pick up signals and remove such content from your feed. This is feasible as it allows the algorithm to make mistakes and a room to learn. But this isn't an explicit remove all political posts and political posts only.

Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like:

"Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status."

Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

> classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial.

There's probably a set of 50 or so keyword combinations, plus the names of current and former politicians and common misspellings, that would cover 90% of cases.

What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off.

FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get from this is worth the small loss of revenue. I bet they will also monetize the data on the list of users who turn off political ads somehow. If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to. At minimum, make it opt-in instead of opt-out.

People are not born “ignorantly arguing”, they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints. This switch could help reduce that phenomenon a bit.

But I agree that it should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and I say that as an extremely politically-aware individual. Politics is important but it doesn’t work well on Facebook and should be discouraged there.

> If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to.

Why would they do it? And why would it be better if they did it?

It is possible to individually block "activists" on FB.

FB has flagged stories that are obviously false for awhile. I deliberately started posting outrageously false stories once Zuckergurg said they wouldn’t flag false posts by politicians.

There was an article recently where someone just copy and pasted posts made by Trump to make a point and their posts got flagged but not the original.

How do you define where the boundary is for what is and isn't politics? Ads paid for by overtly political organisations may be easy to identify, but what about content from individuals?

I feel like a good approximation would be to just turn Bayesian priors on or off (or whatever is their equivalent of "push this widely popular thing, even if it's not supported by this person's specific interests learned from their usage data").

My anecdote: I recently made a Twitter account specifically to follow some artists and share some art. There is nothing in what I wrote on Twitter, or in who I follow or tweets I liked or in fact my IP-based geolocation (I'm not from US) that would say to the Algorithm that I'm in any way interested in American politics. On the contrary, for a long time I tried clicking "not interested in this" for anything related to politics. And yet, the AI timeline in that account is regularly swamped by US political drama I'm not interested in, can't do anything about and generally just makes me miserable.

My only explanation is that these posts get pushed to me because they are overwhelmingly popular overall on Twitter, and the high prior swamps out the negative evidence specific to my account.

Of course, the other, more sinister explanation is that it's a (human) editorial decision from Twitter to actively push this kind of content to people, but I find the technical explanation easier to believe.

Indeed. We tried the "politics ban" at HN and the result was every story had a top comment explaining why it was political and you should flag it. Completely unworkable.

Maybe we should put some effort into making political discourse less damaging to your mental health instead of enabling large parts of a democratic country to just shut themselves off from politics.

It's my feed should I not get a say what I see in it and what I don't?

This is what mean by ideology, the idea that it's more important to make sure I see the right things so hopefully I think the right way takes precedent over how it makes me feel. This sort of thing seems to be all what modern journalism is too, it's all through the lens of editorial now.

I don't want to be on Twitter, I'm on Twitter because Google Reader killed RSS and all the bloggers said "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter" because their follower counts going up made them feel good and now I can't get what I used to get from RSS without the unwanted side serving of (mostly) American politics.

Can that be done? The issue with politics is that the end result in enforce, often metaphorically but sometimes literally, at gunpoint. The real world implications are something that cannot be ignored, unlike a discussion of favorites teams or tv shows. Even coding standards discussions always have the realization that you can do what you want regardless of the standard and the worst case scenarios involve no longer contributing to a project or finding a different employer. Not always the nicest outcomes but still a world's away from being on the losing side of a political debate that makes it into law.

That would be nice, but the number of toxic pundits that would need to be removed from major news organisations and political parties makes it infeasible.

Do we consider controversial subjects to fall under politics? Where is the limit of political content? When I talk about a French company that builds missiles, maybe I’m promoting French soft power.

Talking about race, gender, immigration, sexuality, progressive or conservative subjects clearly falls under politics, because it is inherently connected to a political agenda. Is it really?

> really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that

Twitter has mute filters that do this. Add the surnames of some political candidates to your mute filters, and that alone will improve your Twitter experience - moreso if you use a third party client (like Fenix on Android or Tweetbot on iOS) that doesn't also show likes or random tweet suggestions from people you don't follow.

The downside is you have to put in the filter creation work yourself, but on the plus-side you know exactly what you're filtering out and why. Don't leave it to Twitter to be the judge of what you should and shouldn't see. If you look in your settings, you'll find Twitter is absolutely horrible at determining what you're interested in: on the Twitter website, look at More -> Settings & Privacy -> Account -> Your Twitter Data -> Interests and Ads Data -> Interests From Twitter, and be amazed at all the topics you've never heard of and political candidates that Twitter thinks you are interested in, and is using to push ads and tweet suggestions in your face.

Bonus points for adding other clickbait words to your mute filters, like "outrage". Maybe consider various -isms, like "capitalism" and/or "socialism" if you want to avoid being drawn into decades long debates that won't be solved in 280 characters.

I have been asking for this for a long time. I am happy to see it is gaining traction in some form.

My question is “who is the person who will use this option”? The mild person or the people at the extremes who create these furores? I’m guessing it’ll mostly be used by people in the middle but agitators will keep agitating.

Me.

On Twitter you are able to mute words if that helps in your case

> ideologically think its more important to control the flow of political information that is broadcast to their users

Twitter don't so much "control" the flow of information as hand out firehoses and watch the spray. It's one of the more libertarian social networks left; they leave up known abusers and don't have an explicit ban on sex workers, to give two examples.

I'd love that too, but is it possible?

Would Susan Fowler's famous Uber sexism blog post be considered political? It clearly is a personal story about her year at Uber. It's about work, about tech, and, yes, about sexism. I think that a lot of actually relevant politically influential content is much more like that post than a Biden ad.

You know what we need. A data driven approach to election programs. The primary goal should be to inform the voter how completely clueless they are about the options. One should know how shameful this is. An insult to democracy. There are lots of candidates to chose from and they all have their own program. Howabout you take some time out of your day to vaguely familiarize yourself with the menu before ordering? The second goal should be to further encourage the voter to stop screaming, sit themselves down and make an at least some what less uninformed decision. It's not as boring as it sounds. Some are truly colorful creatures.

https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2020_presidential...

Look at the un-notable candidates. Don't be afraid! I started by looking into Christine Weston Chandler and was not disappointed.

Note:

Last time the green party had 100-250 views on the youtube videos. This is a reasonably well known party. Everyone less noted had considerably less. Some had so few facebook followers as to not account for friends or relatives. To me it means no one in the entire world bothered to look at anything on the list. People say they don't want to be informed by their facebook friends but secretly they don't want to be informed at all. You know who you are! Numbers don't lie!

It's worth noting that upstart successful parties like the Green Party in other countries start from the bottom up (local councils -> state representatives -> national office), because being familiar and having a track record is a great way to earn trust that you deserve the next highest position.

The US Green Party strategy seems to be to go for the jugular in the Presidential election, inevitably lose, and then fizzle out because there's no baseline party to fall back onto.

> Look at the un-notable candidates. Don't be afraid! I started by looking into Christine Weston Chandler and was not disappointed.

Are you sure "Christine Weston Chandler" is a genuine Candidate? A well known and somewhat controversial Internet figure shares the same name. Also, I am barely able to find any other information relating to someone with this name running for president. Might this be a troll candidate?

Yes, yes, yes and yes I suppose. Now lets look at Phil Collins https://www.prohibitionparty.org I'm buying a mug, looks like a great gift https://www.cafepress.com/prohibitionparty.513117792

I am not from US, I hate FB during electoral campagins not because of paid ads but because of people sharing tons of political crap, I would like to hide all political post and shares of my friends and ads.

Hopefully at some point someone notices that politics are a huge turn-off for many people. I live in Poland and EA decided they need me to see a statement for BLM in one of their games. What's the value of that? I have zero influence over the things happening in US and it's not like the topic is not all over the internet anyway. If it weren't for the fact that I play that game with friends I would just uninstall it completely.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that my favorite science fiction author Greg Egan has published a new book. He listed several distributors which are equally good for him. When I saw that one them displayed a huge BLM banner, my decision where where to buy was set.

I also don't live in the US, but similar issues exist in many countries, including mine, and I appreciate any company publically showing their support for this cause (and other causes important to me). Of course some companies support those causes only for publicity reasons. But it's still positive signaling.

>What's the value of that? I have zero influence over the things happening in US

BLM isn't only relevant to the US. It's not as if Poland doesn't have any issues with racism.

I actually think this has been one of the positive effects of the high profile of BLM. Too many European countries have been content to tell themselves that racism is an American problem which they don't have.

This is the problem with reddit also and twitter - indeed all social media.

The main problem is that US political elections "season" runs for 2 years! So out of every 4 years, half of the time is campaigning season so it means that the rest of the worlds social media is polluted with "tons of political crap" 50% of the time.

For US folks: look at how other western democracies run their electoral campaigns to help understand this. They tend to be much much shorter in duration. For international users - remember that for Americans, it's normal to be swamped in political campaigning pollution for half of their time.

American politics became Americans nightly entertainment, its a saturated behemoth with an insatiable appetite. It will not be long until election campaigns are non-stop. There's simply too much money in this game.

> This is the problem with reddit also and twitter - indeed all social media.

Twitter provide a great solution; the ability to mute words. Just mute the names of election candidates and a few other choice buzzwords and all that noise will be gone.

Well, that the US presidential voting system is weird, is out of the question. But simply having a shorter campaign before election is no magic bullet either. Here we have the saying, that politicians only listen to people during the election. So shorten that time, shortens the window to get through with something.

But from a rational and idealistic point of view, none of this makes much sense. Campaigning is a huge waste of everyones attention and energy.

How do you figure it runs for 2 years? The presidential primary starts in the same year as the general election.

It is true that 2 out of 4 years are US election years, but that's because of the midterm elections in the middle.

Unfollow your friends that post boring partisan nonsense.

Alternately, just delete your Facebook account, and stop donating content and ad revenue to a censorship platform.

I done that for some persons, and for people that post religious stuff daily. I hide all from them. But there could be a solution, like say I am a honest person that I want to get elected in a possition in my little village, can I post things and somehow mention to show it only for people that are in the same village as me, so my friends in other locations don't have to see the local stuff.

I am not a big FB user, but FB is the only way I can keep in touch with some of my colleagues from school/university , sadly soem of them are not on FB and the old phone numbers are not valid so they are just gone, no idea if they are still alive

tell me about it. On my browser its quite nice as i have the "F.B. Purity" addon, that lets me choose words to filter entire posts by. So i add both common political part words ( tories, labour, conservative etc ) and my feed is a lot nicer. Its just a shame when i use fb on my phone i get to read that stuff. Muting people for 30 days is a reasonable start i guess, but i'd much rather filter by content

I tried muting people during the 2016 cycle. It worked for sure, my feed was less political garbage. It turns out my feed was also mostly empty. I quit and have been off ever since.

Funny, I only go on facebook to try and pierce my friends’ open political apathy.

Political adverts isn't the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn't be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there's not much hope for any ON/OFF settings on social media.

How would you propose to fix that? Should candidates only be allowed to make "true" statements?

It's a complex issue but having some sort of mechanism where you can't just say:'Poland will attack the US next year,we need to prepare for it!!' and then move on as nothing happened, would help. In the the same way as CEOs can't just walk around talking whatever shit they want to just because they've got fiduciary responsibility,some good practices could be applied to candidates.

Ideally, the voters can vote these people out. Politicians are not hatching from eggs, they come from people and reflect them. Same people who watch blatantly biased news, later are influenced by false ads. Improve education.

This wouldn't completely fix the problem, but I think it would help to not allow candidates to make factually false statements.

That is to say: there may not be a way to objectively say whether a given statement is true, but it is possible to objectively say that some statements are false.

Who verifies what is true or not? Much of the media has a bias either way. Who is the arbiter of absolute truth? Who decides when a theory is mature enough to be absolute fact?

So, before social media, this wasn't regulated by law, but it was to a large extent regulated by the media. Politicians didn't have a good way to lie directly to the public; their main avenue for lying to the public was via the media, which would tend to fact check them.

There's a big difference between "candidate X says that pigs can fly and this is why that's wrong", and "The flying pigs above your house are bigly bad", as far as public messaging goes. Social media has enabled the latter, and it's kind of an unsolved problem. Social media has also caused a major blurring between advertisement and content, which doesn't help.

EDIT: An interesting/worrying byproduct of this seems to be that parts of the media are going further and further off-piste, and letting complete _nonsense_ go by without the "and here's why that's wrong" bit. A glaring recent example was parts of the US right-wing media absolutely tying itself in knots to explain why Trump's rambling about disinfectants for treatment of COVID in humans made sense. It's just really hard to imagine this happening 20 years ago.

> The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.

A lot of the people who appear to believe a given politician's untruths don't actually believe them, but go along because they feel the untruths are a small "price" to pay for the larger goals they share with the politician. The liar is on their "side", after all.

This phenomenon - publicly believing or denying, and privately disbelieving - gets more extreme the greater the untruth. Basically, as long as they are in on the political lie, they don't mind being lied to.

What we may be witnessing here is Facebook introducing a feature that allows them to delay and block legal complaints and requests related to questionable political advertising and influence (whether domestic or foreign).

This feature presumably wouldn't prevent those cases from concluding eventually, but introducing it now could mean that it'd be difficult for jurisdictions (local, state or federal) to prepare and apply meaningful regulations over what Facebook should permit in terms of election-related advertising.

Mark Zuckerberg has previously stated he'll to 'go to the mat'[1] and fight if there's any existential threat to Facebook as a result of the election outcome.

That's probably reassuring for Facebook employees to hear - they are likely to feel more invested in the health of the company that their own careers, social lives and financial outcomes are directly connected to than the health of the U.S. population and government which may seem more distant.

In some less likely scenario it'd even be possible that Facebook leadership would perceive a weak U.S. government as an opportunity for the company to take on a larger role in the nation and perhaps worldwide.

Naively as an outsider it might appear that Facebook's incentives would be to maximize the number of people using Facebook around election time, so that their audience figures and advertising revenue can be maximized.

Creating an opt-out setting for political ads could make a dent in that revenue, although from outside Facebook it's hard to say how many people would become aware of the configuration setting.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/01/mark-zuck...

> introducing it now could mean that it'd be difficult for jurisdictions (local, state or federal) to prepare and apply meaningful regulations over what Facebook should permit in terms of election-related advertising.

What kind of regulation could a US jurisdiction apply that wouldn’t violate the Constitution?

Here is his full Op-Ed: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/17/facebook-vo...

Isn't it bizarre that Facebook has decided it's going to censor exactly 1 type of political view. If you want to discourage someone from voting - a perfectly legitimate position (not necessarily one I whole heartedly agree with, but I think arguments can be made, for example by Russell Brand in 2015[1]). It just seems like pure unadulterated hypocrisy to me.

[1]:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-24648651/russell-brand-i-ve...

Exactly!

And to add to your argument - their encouragement isn't entirely neutral, it will cause a potential turnout increase in the population that uses Facebook. If anyone is bothered by priests in church telling believers to go vote - this is the same thing applied to a different focus group.

This is absolutely pointless... my guess is < 1% of people will turn it on. On the one hand this feature admits there is a problem with political ads (otherwise why have the toggle) and provides a non-solution to fix it (not enough people will filter the bullshit to make any meaningful difference).

This is all exactly within the Facebook playbook.

While I am a nerd hence why an avid reader of HN. My wife is the opposite but if I or someone else points out a useful tip which takes little effort but makes something better/easier it will be read.

Also we need to remember politics in the western nations is still something most people can talk about or mention and put a poster up or wear a badge. The biggest issue will be people avoiding you thinking you might bore them on the subject.

Go to a number of countries in the world. Random political adverts being spotted on your feed may cause you much grief and possibly harm in some way.

The problem is actual disinformation in political ads. Opt-out solves basically nothing, it just has the vague sheen of being a "positive step".

Also, this quote from Zuckerberg galls (emphasis mine):

“I believe Facebook has a responsibility not just to prevent voter suppression -- which disproportionately targets people of colour -- but to actively support well-informed voter engagement, registration, and turnout.”

What is it to "actively support" well-informed voter engagement while taking money from campaigns who make false ads?

I can see how this will stop people being irritated by political adverts they don't like, but I don't see how this addresses the claim that dishonest political adverts are skewing the democratic process.

I no longer receive any Facebook ads. And it's not just my adblock on desktop - I get no ads in mobile either (although I don't watch much FB video). The recently seen ads section is empty. I went through a period where every time I saw an ad I clicked the X and marked it irrelevant, and every so often I go through the list of "businesses that have uploaded your contact information" and marked to hide ads from those entities.

On Instagram I've been following the same procedure and it doesn't seem to be changing anything.

I wish there was a broader filter in Facebook that would allow me to filter by specific terms. So then any post, story, like, etc that would be surfaced into the newsfeed would have to pass through this filter first. If any of the flagged words are found, just block it from my view.

There is still a great deal of positive discovery that happens via Facebook, and they should be letting people customise their noise filters as much as possible so that they can get to the good stuff.

What if someone were to develop an app, browser extension, etc. that automatically disabled political ads in Facebook.

Why not disable political ads by default and if users want them, then they can enable them. Otherwise this is nothing more than the old "opt-out" trick, as used for email spam and now ubiquitous in internet marketing. The choice should not be to "opt-out", it should be to "opt-in".

I don't use facebook, so I am confused, but aren't there apps/browser extension that block all ads, called addblockers? (or are they blocked by facebook?)

Why on earth would I choose to view normal advertisement, but not political?

To be honest I am not an expert in this area either. I know there are ways to avoid ads on Facebook (even without using an adblocker) but these would only be known by more technical users. I also believe Facebook tries to subvert ad blockers. What I am referring to is the idea of an app/extension for non-technical users. Make it so easy that it's "frictionless".

I suspect the political parties would start screaming that Facebook are limiting access to freedom of speech.

Here Facebook is making a stand on what is political and what is not?

Is climate change political? Are immigration policies political? etc..

You need to be authorised to run ads about politics, so this is simple way for them to know if it's a political ad or not. The challenge is if advertisers miss classify what the ad it about, which then is subjective to Facebook as you say.

We just moved the problem one step away. If (for example) i classify my ad about climate-change as non-political. Can Facebook disagree with that?

Yes to both of those examples.

I presume it is going to be ads placed by political parties and PACs

I want the ability to turn off political non-advertisement posts.

I'm surprised we don't get more control over our "feeds" on some platforms - it would be useful signal for advertisers I'd imagine, so there's a win-win aspect.

On Reddit I'd like to filter out (ie remove) all posts with animal pictures.

I keep coming back to Slashdot's model of democratised curation.

It's the same reason Google doesn't let you have more control over the search results. If they give out granular-enough permissions / tooling, then plugins and other tools would be somehow able to make your FB/Google experience akin to a completely different site, with very little control on their part. As a bit of an analogy: They want to be the television that you look at your content through as well as the content provider/curator, but they also don't want to be forced into being just the radio-broadcasting infrastructure provider which is all that they really are if you drill down far enough. Oh and ads, of course.

The FB algorithm of feeding you unchronoligal crap instead of what your friends write seems to get more ad views since you scroll more. It is really user hostile and are depleting there user pool in the long term.

I already have the ability to turn off facebook, and I exercised it years ago.

This and turning off adverts would be a nice combination.

Pretty sure this is an AI-complete problem

This is a regex-complete problem.

It would be fine if they allow to turn ALL the adverts :) I barely use FB anymore is just adverts. It was nice when it started, just friends posts, now most of my good friends left or do not use it anymore.

And a lot of friends posts are also adverts.

There are:

- Official Facebook sponsored posts

- Viral ads, the most obvious being "share this and get a chance to win..."

- Friends or promoting their own, their friends or some other business they want to promote

- Friends trying to sell their stuff

Just because it comes from someone close doesn't make it less of an ad.

And for some reason Facebook algorithms seem to put the least interesting post forwards. Personal ads, pseudo-profound bullshit and viral "opinion" pieces, etc... My friends in real life are people I find interesting, I mean, why would I want them as friends otherwise? But looking at my Facebook feed, I don't recognize the people I enjoy spending time with.

Can we deduce from this move that political ads are a minor share of Facebook's revenue? If so, I somehow feel good about it.

Perhaps Facebook should have a legal obligation to disclose that share.

In a way they already do, all political ads on facebook (in any country) are public information through their Ad Library Report: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-...

Simply take their earning reports and divide one by the other and you'll get the percentage of revenue

I am not sure that we can deduce that, but regardless I feel good about it.

Facebook has been (successfully) evading ad blockers for a long time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21688816

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367

This may sound positive (less ads, less disinformation) at first glance, but I think it's actually a terrible and dangerous development.

Zuck has seen that he's going to get hate no matter what his political content moderation policy is, so he thinks he can escape that by literally escaping from it: letting users just turn it off.

But while he has the legal right to, in the larger societal sense it's dangerously and profoundly antidemocratic. One of the most famous quotes regarding political speech is:

> "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." — Justice Louis Brandeis (emphasis added)

Enforced silence is the antithesis of a healthy democratic society. The ability to close yourself off in a bubble where you can't be reached by opposing viewpoints is relinquishing your duties as a democratic citizen.

The true downside of this is that people will continue to get toxic, false political speech from their crazy uncles, friends and family members -- and truth-minded political groups will be unable to place ads to counter that influence.

This is why it's a a terrible, dangerous development. Again -- Zuck has every legal right to do it since Facebook is a private (not governmental) entity. But as Facebook these days is essentially half of our national "town square" of citizens (the other half being Twitter), this is not a good direction for America (or the world broadly) to head in.

Ads give more power to those with more money. It's not a leveled playing field, at least in the US.

Many countries limit spending on adverts (or campaigns in general) for this reason.

I'm not making any claims about how level the playing field is, or whether there ought to be limits to political ad spending in order to create a more balanced conversation.

I'm arguing that being able to choose to eliminate political advertising entirely is antidemocratic. That's not balance -- it's deeply unbalanced.

To test the strength of this argument, I'm imagining a world in which ads have invaded our homes even further, and can now be found on the refrigerator door, the bathroom mirror, and the bedroom ceiling. Would you consider switching off political ads in those places to be relinquishing your duties as a democratic citizen?

That's not the argument I made.

A healthy democracy needs to have places for democratic discussion. Not all places need to be for it -- that would be terrible. But some places.

Today, those places are mainly TV news/commentary, newspaper/magazine reporting and analysis, and Facebook+Twitter. Each of them have different strengths and weaknesses.

Eliminating any of them for political speech would be a huge loss. To expand beyond them (into your home and refrigerator), you'd have to make an argument that it served a purpose that wasn't already served by the three domains I already mentioned. Which I don't see an argument for.

You're posing a "slippery slope" argument here, but I don't think that applies.

>The ability to close yourself off in a bubble where you can't be reached by opposing viewpoints is relinquishing your duties as a democratic citizen.

This is only true if each side has a valid and reasonable difference of opinion. This is not true for hate speech and other propaganda. For example, it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to say that people with dark skin are subhuman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

Yes, which is why many European countries have laws against hate speech, although the US doesn't.

But political advertising doesn't equal hate speech. Many people currently support the idea of Facebook and Twitter prohibiting hate speech, political or not.

That has nothing to do with being able to turn off political speech in general. It's a totally separate issue.

As for propaganda, that's in the eye of the beholder. Which is why we generally frown on censorship, because one person's propaganda is another person's deeply felt, legitimate political viewpoint.

Would you apply this "hate speech" label to Yakub and such such ideas? I need to know how seriously to take you.

It is not the duty of democratic citizens to subject themselves to advertisements. It is possible, and indeed preferable, to engage in bidirectional political discourse with other humans. e.g. Actually talk to people and have conversations.

>Enforced silence is the antithesis of a healthy democratic society.

Your right to free speech goes hand-in-hand with my right to ignore your speech, for I which nowadays I need the earplugs. Do you not think I have that right?

Huh? This isn't a toggle to turn off political _speech_ on fb, just ads.

Or do you believe that Justice Louis Brandeis would have also demanded the societal remedy of "more ads"?

This misses the point hard. The problem is people who don't realize they're being lied to.

I think FB (and Zuck) have made it pretty clear by now that they actively want their users to be free to consume what they want, even if others think that’s bad for them. They understand what they’re doing.

That's blatantly false. Try posting porn, or lies in ads about non-political topics. Political ads are the only thing that gets a pass.

Are you implying a corporation should be in charge of critical thinking for a society; a corporate ministry of truth?

They've already decided to do this, they just carved out an exception for when it's a politician lying. Read their terms of service.

I guess I just want the list in the order that it was posted in and without political ads.

I turned off political Facebook adverts by simply uninstalling the app and never using it

Next trend: subliminal political propaganda in what looks like product ads.

This has "Users interested in political advertising should opt IN" written all over it.

But I imagine that wouldn't sit very well at caring-and-considerate Facebook HQ as it would dent the bottom line

What a cop out. This doesn't fix any of the problems, not to mention that given it's a default that doesn't materially affect the users experience most people won't enable it.

I don't use Facebook but I hope they can do this with Instagram too. As a non-citizen, and hence non-voter, living in the US I'm sick of being bombarded with political campaign ads.

This is a good start. I always thought it would be great to have a "no X today" button, where I could mute all political content, all sports content, all WWDC content, etc.

This probably also means that advertisers will pay more per impression, with obviously fewer impressions, because whoever sees the ads will be more receptive to political ads.

How do they determine what is 'political'?

In common language usage I see folks describing everything as 'political'.

There's info here:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/167836590566506?id=28...

But that doesn't fully capture it. They also have definitions of social issues, which is a subset of this shorthand of political ads:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/214754279118974?id=28...

Here's how those ads are reviewed:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/313752069181919?id=28...

If you go into the United States at that last link, you can see further definitions by issue. So, civil rights, or education, or guns.

I figured out how to do this a long time before Facebook made an official feature for it: delete your Facebook account.

The people who need it the most are going to be the least likely to not take advantage of it.

Top feature of 2020 right there.

Good move for the users. Solves the issue of having political ads promoted on your feed and gives users the option as: If you don't like it, disable these political ads altogether.

How about only showing friends feed and letting the user decide what to filter out?

I do think we should give credit where it's due, this is a nice feature

As long as this is an opt-out setting, and not a community standard, this is a cop-out.

The problem is not "our poor users are bombarded with untrue political ads!" The problem is that Facebook has become a cesspool that breeds conspiracy theories and communities of disinformation and denial the same way that stagnant swampwater breeds mosquitoes and other harmful pests. Its tight-knit havens of the willfully disinformed will not opt out of "the real truth" (read: the coordinated distribution of lies).

If Facebook was actually interested in addressing the problem of its festering pits of QAnon and antivaxxers and the like, it would start by deplatforming advertisers who intentionally spread lies. No, it's clear that Facebook's intent here is to put up the paltriest, lowest-actual-impact defense against any sort of consequences that legal systems might bring against it.

Why should they block content you don't like? Move to another platform.

More specifically, why does one get to decide what content another person sees, on a platform?

What are the bets that this feature only exists for this election?

Even if "only for the election", nobody pays for political advertisements when an election isn't near. The disinformation problem won't go away in 2024.

Facebook? What is that?

I would love to be able to turn off fake gurus' adverts.

Wow, Hacker News loves ads all of a sudden.

Hilarious to see people try to spin why allowing someone to personally block ads is a bad thing.

I see uBlock touted here everyday, so blocking all ads okay, but we HAVE to force people to see political ads?

Give me a way to turn off political posts as well please.

That obviously doesn't address the problem.

Nobody will use this. Facebook is defaultsville

FB political ads don't seem to be the root cause of their radicalizing influence. My understanding is that it's more related to how their algorithms push more and more extreme pages and groups.

A relatively non-partisan person who likes a news article about gun rights gets pushed news and pages that promote more conservative viewpoints, and those pages lead to fringe ideas, conspiracy theories, and the groups that promote those ideas.

Trump/Biden ads seem less problematic than memes about vigilante justice against minorities that float around FB.

There's some interesting shifting going re: social media & politics.

Twitter made their decision about political ads. I guess it was a hard call... revenue potential. Meanwhile, Twitter is coming under more pressure and scrutiny. Politicians, moguls and such use it. If they feel twitter is being unfair (or just unfavourable) to them.... Trump isn't Pewdiepie.

Youtube has been generally backing away from "hot" content. Covid & Floyd George were very visible examples. Searches and recommendations directed people to official and TV content, not "youtubers."

Alphabet just don't want some random video on covid, police protests or whatnot going viral... not unless the channel is NBC's or something. The risk-reward is terrible. I'm guessing that "politics" generally will follow this route on youtube. They just want to be light entertainment. They want out of the heat.

Facebook though... FB have an overwhelming interest in politics. Politics is going to be a big revenue source. It's also an important content source. The moral hazards here are insane. Zuch makes Murdoch look quaint. The small details of these policies are media equivalents of gerrymandering, and they'll have a lot of influence on politics in the coming years.

The idea behind this "turning off political ads" is to prevent the masses by being fooled into voting for one party over the other due to "fake" news.

As someone who was born and brought up in a third world country, this is my observation because I have a different perspective on this.

People like Donald Trump have won elections despite severe personal and public failings. And the reason they win is because they are demagogues. They have the ability to connect to voter's emotions.

Obama is not a demagogue but he dripped with Charisma and had the ability to connect to everyone and share his vision for a better America. Likewise for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan had immense Charisma.

Hillary Clinton is not an inspiring person. She did not have the same kind of Charisma or Vibe that Obama had.

All of this started because Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 to Donald Trump. If Hillary Clinton won the election, this wouldn't even be a discussion.

There is this quote from Rocky Balboa:

Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you!

If Obama contested in the 2016 elections, there is a good chance he would have beaten Trump. It is true that there was fake news. We can't assume that the fake news was the sole cause for Hillary Clinton's defeat. This is a media narrative which was unable to come to terms with the fact that a racist narc like DT was able to defeat Clinton.

DT would have beaten Hillary regardless of the "fake articles" on Facebook. Blaming it on anything else is the same as not taking responsibility for being wrong about the election.

It’s honestly shocking that in a country of 300M people u can’t find someone economically and politically sane to lead the country.

i'd also want to turn off political wall posts.

In fact, I think facebook would be much better if I could turn off every last feature facebook has.

From the article:

> President Trump saying "when the shooting starts, the looting starts”

They have the quote backwards. I may be crazy, but it seems strange to not notice the error. What Trump actually wrote is far more insidious than how he is being quoted.

Last election the majority of the so-called political stories that I saw my relatives sharing were a bunch of fly-by-night Macedonian sites. This does nothing to deal with that. It only deals with official, directly paid advertisements. And those are not anywhere near the most problematic political crap on Facebook.

I wonder if this excludes posts which pay to be boosted? So many of the "ads" on FB are not banners, they're paid boosts of random posts (content, video, etc). IMO, these are the problem as they are difficult for people to ID as ads and appear to be legit.

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I left FB not because of the things I could identify as ads, but fake stories and hate memes shared by other users. Then hateful / terroristic / reality denying comments were also a problem. "Time for a civil war" "soon we will start shooting anti-gun people" and these got at of likes.

FB is a genocide machine, and I don't think it is entirely because of ad content.

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