It's crazy to me that we allow politicians to run targeted ad campaigns.<p>I randomly looked up Andrew Yang on good a few days ago on my phone and had ads from two billionaires take up my whole screen.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/Ke3aWBH" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/Ke3aWBH</a><p>Without campaign finance regulation majority of the billions donated to campaigns is going directly into pockets of Google, Facebook and cable monopolies. We're letting billionaires buy the election.<p>> What has Bloomberg been spending on? Per the Federal Elections Commission data through the end of 2019, the two biggest costs have been television advertising ($132 million) and digital outreach ($20 million). Some of the costs reflect a late entry to the campaign—buying lists of voters to contact ($3.2 million), hiring people to gather signatures to get his name on the ballot ($373,441), and hiring recruiters to bring onboard staff ($107,000).<p><a href="https://qz.com/1802367/detailing-mike-bloombergs-unprecedented-2020-campaign-spending/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/1802367/detailing-mike-bloombergs-unprecedent...</a><p>How are we supposed to trust the media when they're on track to get a billion dollars from a single candidate?
It was <i>blatantly obvious</i> that social networks are ideal tools for corporate and political propaganda. It was obvious from the very beginning, where people sung praises to Web 2.0 and "collective intelligence". Moreover, real technologists wrote about it, extensively, at the time:<p><a href="https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism" rel="nofollow">https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...</a><p>If some "technologist" acts surprised by this turn of events now, I see only two possibilities:<p>1. They are genuine, but absolutely suck at analyzing how technology actually works in society.<p>2. They are liars who knew the dangers of such systems, but didn't find them objectionable because it suited their goals at the time.<p>What seriously disturbs me is that almost everyone from academia or big tech who engage in public discourse on this issue right now - almost all of them <i>do</i> act surprised.
I was personally a fan of Yang’s platform position where every citizen received an annual $100 credit that could be transferred to candidates. Instead of trying to restrict what can and can’t be said, give the citizens enough aggregate buying power to over shadow the lobbyists.<p><a href="https://www.yang2020.com/policies/democracydollars/" rel="nofollow">https://www.yang2020.com/policies/democracydollars/</a>
Why is it that paying influencers to push agendas (business or political) not considered advertising. I can understand that facebook shouldn't be held accountable for legitimacy of this type of advertising but if an instagram or facebook account has a large enough following they should be treated as advertisers themselves and scrutinized accordingly
Advertising is absolutely a malignant tumor on society. It's unstoppable and impossible to know where it's going to show up and how.<p>Legitimately creative geniuses will find every possible way to try and influence you to buy their thing or vote for their person, and I really don't know if it's possible to stop it.
It's increasingly clear that Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp are applications that every technologist should shun, and advocate against in their personal lives and in their workplace based on the actions of the corporation that owns them.
> Facebook said it is asking the influencer accounts that posted the Bloomberg memes to retroactively use the tool meant for such posts. After this happens, the posts will be labeled as a "paid partnership" with Bloomberg.<p>> Campaigns that avoid using the tool, as Bloomberg had, risk having their accounts suspended.<p>I don't see how this is a bad thing. Facebook made the right decision here.
Very misleading headline - they <i>are</i> allowing ads, they're just not ads that Facebook is being paid for. An Instagram influencer being paid to say something nice about a politician is an ad - full stop.
Interesting case. Is Facebook or any platform expected to be the police of all their users' private contracts? That the legitimacy of content is based on how profitable is for the poster and who paid them?
We have build a chrome extension that block political ads on facebook (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-factual-news-evaluato/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-factual-news-e...</a>). The extension also rates credibility of news articles you read.<p>Facebook should stop allowing micro-targeting for political ads. Period.
I think that is ok, as long as it is not promoted to the top. The problem with ads is (a) the extreme targeting, and (b) too much incentive for the publishing platform to show more of them. This whole problem would be way more manageable if they did not allow political ads, or at least disallow specific targeting other than coarse-grained ones like may be zip code.
This will probably run afoul of some advertisement regulations in some countries (not that fb cares, of course).<p>(for those who didn't RTFA - it's referring to "sponsored posts" or "branded content")
tl;dr<p>my read is:<p>Rather than paying for direct ads candidate Bloomberg paid
"social media influencers" to post his message. Apparently
it would be difficult to enforce a rule preventing that, so
Facebook has decided to allow it.
It is nuts that two 100 year old billionaires are trying to become president by out-meming each other. Can’t wait to wake up from this alternate reality
I don't understand this appeal for facebook to be politics babysitter, if anything I would want them not to do anything or interfere in any way. Let people speak their minds and leave me alone to decide.
Bloomberg has little organic support compared to the hundreds of millions he is spending. 2016 was clear evidence that money does not buy elections (Clinton outspent Trump 2:1) and this election cycle will demonstrate the same as Bloomberg loses the primary.
This isn't directly related to political ads on social media, but I think it's absurd we ever created a system where elections became a fundraising arms race. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that system inevitably leads to bad incentives.<p>Every election in the US should require a publicly funded pool that's equally divided between the top ____ candidates using polling numbers to determine who those are. Any funding outside of that public fund should be banned.<p>This way, candidates focus their time and energy on catering to the largest number of voters, not the largest sources of donations. No donations whatsoever should be allowed, full stop.