Facebook Will Bring Political Ad Transparency Tools To India Ahead of 2019 Elections (venturebeat.com) 52
As India inches closer to its general elections, Facebook announced today that it is bringing transparency to political ads on its platform in the country early next year. From a report: This would make India the fourth market -- after the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K. -- where Facebook offers users a disclaimer on political ads. Facebook began offering users in the U.S. information about the buyer of a political ad as part of a series of changes last year to fight misinformation and foreign meddling in elections. [...]
Facebook said Thursday that it will also maintain an online searchable Ad Library, as it has in other markets, which will document all the ads related to politics from a particular advertiser alongside other information such as range of impressions, demographics that saw the ad, and the budget that went behind an individual ad. India, which is Facebook's largest market, could be the biggest test yet for whether the company has learned from its recent mistakes.
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Bill Gates and his mighty Poop In Da Jar are on it!
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Replying to myself - It just occurred to me this is very on-topic! You see, Facebook is a load of Shit in an innocuous container - curiously, very similar to Mr. Gates's current poopy talking point.
Atlantic council to intervene in Indian elections (Score:1)
So, Facebook - with its deep and troubling/criminal connections to Imperialist think tanks like the Atlantic council, and US government agencies like the NSA, will intervene in internal Indian policies before the upcoming elections. Perhaps they'll also help "discover"a Russian plot to subvert the elections, just like the retroactively "discovered" that at the behest of the US government and mainstream media.
I can't wait. I'm sure we're all going to LIKE it a lot though.
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Transparency is the best approach (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than blocking ads from ideologies you disagree with, simply illuminating who is paying for ads would help a lot - what would be great is if they not only would say who is paying for a particular ad, but follow the chain of company ownership backwards and report the string of owners than let to the funding for that ad... Facebook has the kind of size and money it would take to accomplish that.
Now THAT would be some transparency! And to my mind bring some degree of redemption to Facebook.
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What happens when they hide (Score:2)
For starters I think foreign governments should have to disclose that in the adverts. Same for anyone financially tied to
Face book could do it though (Score:2)
What happens when they hide behind 10 LLCs to obscure who's really paying for it? If you're a journalist with lots of free time maybe you can track that down
What I'm saying is that Facebook has the kind of money to track down those ten LLC's, and if they are serious about really having fair political ads, that is what they should be doing. It would take minuscule resources to dig all this up if you just had a small team doing it for every political ad buyer.
Also, the point of a lot of these adverts is to i
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For starters I think foreign governments should have to disclose that in the adverts.
Yeah that would be nice but obviously they will not, but Facebook of all people is probably in the best position to find that out., and reveal if that is the case.
That's all true, however from Facebook's perspective, they'd be turning paying customers (governments/political orgs that pay them for data and influence) into opponents that would stand in the way of furthering their growth and increasing their profits. It would literally require an Act of Congress to force them to do as you suggest as it's not in their best corporate interests. They want the status quo, or ideally even a rollback of legal protections and limits currently in place.
Facebook is straddling th
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It isn't about trying to make a person swing from one side to the other. It is about normalising a slightly more extreme form of already held views to nudge people a little bit more in the desired direction. This basically allows the individual to be moved toward the desired goal without ever being truly challenged in their views.
The ultimate aim of these campaigns is to hollow out the centre-ground and create internal conflict by pushing people to partisan extremes. In this way a foreign power can permanen
Why is that not doable? (Score:2)
Absolutely not doable with current US law
Why? You need to explain why something you categorically dismiss as being against law, is...
It's perfectly legal to look up company ownership records, and follow a path back to a root entity.
There are probably some masking techniques they could not get around, but most of the groups making these ads are not that clever. Even if you are stopped tracing back at some point you could probably find an interesting root for a lot of ads and groups.
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Now THAT would be some transparency! And to my mind bring some degree of redemption to Facebook.
Or, if they're honest about who's paying for what it may be the nail in the coffin for FaceBook, as them taking payments from powers in others countries, for ads on presidential campaigns, may piss some folks off - if this happens at FaceBook.
I am tired of hearing about FB (Score:2)
Look folks, is it just me? Aren't a good chunk of you just tired of hearing about Facebook in the news? One cannot escape this thing every other day!
Sincerely, I am just sick of hearing about this. Sadly, I have nothing to do about it for Slashdot isn't making matters better.
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No, I am not tired of hearing that Facebook's abuse of it's user data is being examined. I'm not tired of hearing that Facebook is abusing it's market position. I am not at all tired of hearing that Mark Zuckerberg thinks we are all "Dumb Fucks". I want to hear more about how governments around the world are looking into the actions of Facebook. I want to hear more detail, more facts.
You may want us to bury our heads in the sand. But I don't.
I just want M'Smash to leave.
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You can submit stories that interest you. It's not that hard.
Better do it in Washington State too (Score:2)
Otherwise, jail time.
Ad market and politics? (Score:2)
Should an ad company get to shape domestic politics in a nation with their own idea of "tools"?