Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

I&#x27;d also love a feature that lets me block <i>non-advertising</i> political content.<p>A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That&#x27;s not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s temptation to get on a soapbox.

It&#x27;s a good feature from an individual perspective. It&#x27;s not a good feature if you don&#x27;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&#x27;t reach Democrat voters or vice versa?<p>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 &quot;fact check&quot; political ads on Facebook and Twitter. Why? I&#x27;m sure it has nothing to do with billions spent on political ads (revenue that will go to traditional media outlets if it can&#x27;t be spent on social media), nor anything to do with the pro-Democratic party bias in almost all traditional media.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA</a>

I wonder if it&#x27;ll be a obscurely named toggle hidden away in a settings sub page somewhere just so they can say they&#x27;ve offered the option.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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..<p>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?

Facebook has a really interesting feature that I haven’t seen in Twitter, Google, or others. I can block all ads from a page.<p>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.<p>I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.

I&#x27;m a political advertiser as part of my job and one thing most people don&#x27;t get is that it&#x27;s not just ELECTORAL ads that Facebook usually is referring to when they&#x27;re talking about &quot;political&quot; ads. It&#x27;s, as mentioned in the article, a shorthand for &quot;Ads About Social Issues, Elections or Politics.&quot;<p>So, a few points. First, the obvious, that these things all depend on the extent to which Facebook promotes this &quot;feature.&quot; So with that said:<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s coordinated in a way Facebook would never do. This will also hurt recruitment for members who want to knock on doors.<p>2. They define social issues as &quot;sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the outcome of an election or result in&#x2F;relate to existing or proposed legislation.&quot; That&#x27;s an &quot;or&quot; joining those, so it&#x27;s an incredibly broad category. Expect more to be swept up in this than people in this thread are talking about.<p>3. The category is so broad that it&#x27;s going to include most union ad activity. Not just organizing new workers, but let&#x27;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&#x27;s not actually about public policy, yet Facebook generally will reject this type of ad if it&#x27;s not categorized as &quot;political.&quot; Facebook and Google both have anti-union ad practices, but this is unintentionally going to make it worse.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;debated&quot; topics?

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&#x27;s look at what the measures are -<p>-an opt-out option for political ads: <i>&quot;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 &quot;Paid for&quot; political disclaimer.&quot;</i><p>-encouraging voter enfranchisement: <i>&quot;Mr Zuckerberg went on to encourage people who aren&#x27;t signed up as voters to register in time for the US election in November.&quot;</i><p>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&#x27;t design against every crisis...but you can design to say you took &quot;reasonable measures&quot; to prevent a crisis. I think that&#x27;s exactly what these measures are aimed at doing. Someone pointed out in an earlier thread that it&#x27;s the people who don&#x27;t think to opt-out that are most in need of &quot;protecting&quot;.

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 &quot;Politics On&#x2F;Off&quot; hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don&#x27;t want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they&#x27;re not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s not as boring as it sounds. Some are truly colorful creatures.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ballotpedia.org&#x2F;List_of_registered_2020_presidential_candidates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ballotpedia.org&#x2F;List_of_registered_2020_presidential...</a><p>Look at the un-notable candidates. Don&#x27;t be afraid! I started by looking into Christine Weston Chandler and was not disappointed.<p>Note:<p>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&#x27;t want to be informed by their facebook friends but secretly they don&#x27;t want to be informed at all. You know who you are! Numbers don&#x27;t lie!

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.

Political adverts isn&#x27;t the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it&#x27;s true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn&#x27;t be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there&#x27;s not much hope for any ON&#x2F;OFF settings on social media.

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).<p>This feature presumably wouldn&#x27;t prevent those cases from concluding eventually, but introducing it now could mean that it&#x27;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.<p>Mark Zuckerberg has previously stated he&#x27;ll to &#x27;go to the mat&#x27;[1] and fight if there&#x27;s any existential threat to Facebook as a result of the election outcome.<p>That&#x27;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.<p>In some less likely scenario it&#x27;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.<p>Naively as an outsider it might appear that Facebook&#x27;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.<p>Creating an opt-out setting for political ads could make a dent in that revenue, although from outside Facebook it&#x27;s hard to say how many people would become aware of the configuration setting.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;oct&#x2F;01&#x2F;mark-zuckerberg-facebook-elizabeth-warren-big-tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;oct&#x2F;01&#x2F;mark-zuck...</a>

Here is his full Op-Ed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eu.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;facebook-voter-campaign-strengthen-democracy-mark-zuckerberg-column&#x2F;3191152001&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eu.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;facebook-vo...</a><p>Isn&#x27;t it bizarre that Facebook has decided it&#x27;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.<p>[1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;av&#x2F;uk-24648651&#x2F;russell-brand-i-ve-never-voted-never-will" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;av&#x2F;uk-24648651&#x2F;russell-brand-i-ve...</a>

This is absolutely pointless... my guess is &lt; 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).<p>This is all exactly within the Facebook playbook.

The problem is actual disinformation in political ads. Opt-out solves basically nothing, it just has the vague sheen of being a &quot;positive step&quot;.<p>Also, this quote from Zuckerberg galls (emphasis mine):<p>“I believe Facebook has a responsibility not just to prevent voter suppression -- which disproportionately targets people of colour -- but to <i>actively support well-informed voter engagement</i>, registration, and turnout.”<p>What is it to &quot;actively support&quot; 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&#x27;t like, but I don&#x27;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&#x27;s not just my adblock on desktop - I get no ads in mobile either (although I don&#x27;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 &quot;businesses that have uploaded your contact information&quot; and marked to hide ads from those entities.<p>On Instagram I&#x27;ve been following the same procedure and it doesn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Why not disable political ads by default and if users want them, then they can <i>enable</i> them. Otherwise this is nothing more than the old &quot;opt-out&quot; trick, as used for email spam and now ubiquitous in internet marketing. The choice should not be to &quot;opt-out&quot;, it should be to &quot;opt-in&quot;.

Here Facebook is making a stand on what is political and what is not?<p>Is climate change political? Are immigration policies political? etc..

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

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.

Can we deduce from this move that political ads are a minor share of Facebook&#x27;s revenue? If so, I somehow feel good about it.<p>Perhaps Facebook should have a legal obligation to disclose that share.

Facebook has been (successfully) evading ad blockers for a long time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21688816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21688816</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uAssets&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uAssets&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3367</a>

This may sound positive (less ads, less disinformation) at first glance, but I think it&#x27;s actually a <i>terrible</i> and <i>dangerous</i> development.<p>Zuck has seen that he&#x27;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.<p>But while he has the legal right to, in the larger societal sense it&#x27;s dangerously and profoundly antidemocratic. One of the most famous quotes regarding political speech is:<p>&gt; &quot;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 <i>more speech, not enforced silence</i>.&quot; — Justice Louis Brandeis (emphasis added)<p>Enforced silence is the <i>antithesis</i> of a healthy democratic society. The ability to close yourself off in a bubble where you can&#x27;t be reached by opposing viewpoints is relinquishing your duties as a democratic citizen.<p>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.<p>This is why it&#x27;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 &quot;town square&quot; of citizens (the other half being Twitter), this is <i>not</i> a good direction for America (or the world broadly) to head in.

This misses the point hard. The problem is people who don&#x27;t realize they&#x27;re being lied to.

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 &quot;Users interested in political advertising should opt IN&quot; written all over it.<p>But I imagine that wouldn&#x27;t sit very well at caring-and-considerate Facebook HQ as it would dent the bottom line

What a cop out. This doesn&#x27;t fix any of the problems, not to mention that given it&#x27;s a default that doesn&#x27;t materially affect the users experience most people won&#x27;t enable it.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;m sick of being bombarded with political campaign ads.

This is a good start. I always thought it would be great to have a &quot;no X today&quot; 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 &#x27;political&#x27;?<p>In common language usage I see folks describing everything as &#x27;political&#x27;.

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.

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

I do think we should give credit where it&#x27;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.<p>The problem is not &quot;our poor users are bombarded with untrue political ads!&quot; 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 <i>not</i> opt out of &quot;the <i>real</i> truth&quot; (read: the coordinated distribution of lies).<p>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&#x27;s clear that Facebook&#x27;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.

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

Facebook? What is that?

I would love to be able to turn off fake gurus&#x27; adverts.

Wow, Hacker News loves ads all of a sudden.<p>Hilarious to see people try to spin why allowing someone to personally block ads is a bad thing.<p>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&#x27;t address the problem.

Nobody will use this. Facebook is defaultsville

FB political ads don&#x27;t seem to be the root cause of their radicalizing influence. My understanding is that it&#x27;s more related to how their algorithms push more and more extreme pages and groups.<p>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.<p>Trump&#x2F;Biden ads seem less problematic than memes about vigilante justice against minorities that float around FB.

There&#x27;s some interesting shifting going re: social media &amp; politics.<p>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&#x27;t Pewdiepie.<p>Youtube has been generally backing away from &quot;hot&quot; content. Covid &amp; Floyd George were very visible examples. Searches and recommendations directed people to official and TV content, not &quot;youtubers.&quot;<p>Alphabet just don&#x27;t want some random video on covid, police protests or whatnot going viral... not unless the channel is NBC&#x27;s or something. The risk-reward is terrible. I&#x27;m guessing that &quot;politics&quot; generally will follow this route on youtube. They just want to be light entertainment. They want out of the heat.<p>Facebook though... FB have an overwhelming interest in politics. Politics is going to be a big revenue source. It&#x27;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&#x27;ll have a lot of influence on politics in the coming years.

The idea behind this &quot;turning off political ads&quot; is to prevent the masses by being fooled into voting for one party over the other due to &quot;fake&quot; news.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s emotions.<p>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.<p>Hillary Clinton is not an inspiring person. She did not have the same kind of Charisma or Vibe that Obama had.<p>All of this started because Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 to Donald Trump. If Hillary Clinton won the election, this wouldn&#x27;t even be a discussion.<p>There is this quote from Rocky Balboa:<p>Now if you know what you&#x27;re worth then go out and get what you&#x27;re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain&#x27;t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain&#x27;t you!<p>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&#x27;t assume that the fake news was the sole cause for Hillary Clinton&#x27;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.<p>DT would have beaten Hillary regardless of the &quot;fake articles&quot; on Facebook. Blaming it on anything else is the same as not taking responsibility for being wrong about the election.

i&#x27;d also want to turn off political wall posts.

From the article:<p>&gt; President Trump saying &quot;when the shooting starts, the looting starts”<p>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 &quot;ads&quot; on FB are not banners, they&#x27;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 &#x2F; terroristic &#x2F; reality denying comments were also a problem. &quot;Time for a civil war&quot; &quot;soon we will start shooting anti-gun people&quot; and these got at of likes.<p>FB is a genocide machine, and I don&#x27;t think it is entirely because of ad content.