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Comment by schwinn140 | Hacker News Reader

Simple solutions:

* Block all political ads all the time.

* Require all political parties, and their PACS, to register as a known Advertiser account within the system. Any time an ad runs, and regardless of the source, the associated party will be heavily penalized with a removal of their non-paid content.

There needs to be ramifications for their abuse of the platform. Being that Facebook can't charge them a fine, penalizing their organic exposure is the only thing that they can hold against them.

Multiple offenses will result in longer and longer periods of their content being "muted".

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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but does this not potentially incentivise political organisations running their opposition's ads (it's probably feasible to do so in such a way that they don't really reach anyone) and then reporting the infractions and thereby getting their opposition punished?

These are "simple" solutions--i.e., not good ones.

Fair enough. What do you propose?

Can they not charge them a fine? Can't they put something in their terms that requires a monetary penalty as well as a "time-out"?

I love your solutions but I also worry that facebook wouldn't want to put them in place because of all the lost revenue, if you make the abuser pay for the lost revenue then all incentives seem aligned

Completely banning political ads puts incumbents at a huge advantage. Emerging challengers don't have nearly as much free organic distribution, so they need to buy ads to build momentum and expand their reach.

Even in the current US presidential election, Biden has 3.2 million Facebook followers while Trump 31.7mm on his personal page and 6.3mm on his presidential page.

Without paying for ads that extend your audience beyond your pre-existing followers, the incumbents will always have more reach for their messages.

Completely agree that we should be able to see the people responsible for running each of these ads though, with personal liability for the content that they're sharing.

Good point regarding the incumbents. This clearly isn't a simple problem to solve...some one will always lose.

Sadly, we cannot trust our political leaders to simply do the right thing. To the contrary, we need to have these types of discussions in an effort to govern the government. :(

You describe the system pretty much in place for decades in western european countries. The problem is, media companies have grown dependant on the easy 9figures in ad revenue they are all but guaranteed each election cycle. Take that election rev away and the 4th estate collapses.

Only if they wanted a fair balance, I think Facebook is just aiming to under advertise Conservatives. There is no secret that about 95% of all donations from Silicon Valley goes to Democrats. It won't take too long until the whole world is a mirror of California.

It's not quite 95% all around, here are the top ones with the percentage of all their employees' contributions to the Democrat party:

    Netflix           = 98%
    Nvidia            = 93%
    Adobe             = 93%
    IBM               = 90%
    Salesforce        = 89%
    Google            = 88%
    Microsoft         = 85%
    Apple             = 84%
    Paypal            = 84%
    Cisco             = 80%
    Amazon            = 77%
    Facebook          = 77%
    Intel             = 68%
    Broadcom          = 68%
    Oracle            = 67%
    Texas Instruments = 60%
    Qualcomm          = 50%

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-...

Still pretty bad, and makes one worry about where those employees are donating their non-political and non-tracked donations to.

Edit. Added source.

Surprising it’s the Dems in Congress that want to break up tech then. I guess money isn’t everything.

I thought it was more being driven/pushed by conservatives?

Edit. Wow, this conversation is seriously devolved when a simple question gets downvoted.

Those are employee contributions, in their capacity as private citizens, not contributions made by the company. Don't forget to count company PAC contributions, often made to both sides.

I didn't say they were made by the company, I said they were made by the employees of those companies. It's important as it speaks to the huge imbalance of democrat vs conservative individuals inside those companies.

And who at the companies are making decisions about policy? Employees.

.. not really? Most of the time policy is set from the top. Netflix isn't exactly a worker co-op.

Everybody contributes to a companies culture and that drives the people at the top too.

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