Dissent Erupts at Facebook Over Hands-Off Stance on Political Ads (nytimes.com) 123
The New York Times: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network's recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted -- even false ones -- in ads on the site. It asked Facebook's leaders to rethink the stance. Facebook's position on political advertising is "a threat to what FB stands for," said the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. "We strongly object to this policy as it stands." The message was written by Facebook's own employees. For the past two weeks, the text has been publicly visible on Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses to communicate internally. More than 250 employees have signed the letter, according to three people who have seen it and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.
While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook's 35,000-plus work force, it was one sign of the resistance that the company is now facing internally over how it treats political ads. Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said. For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions -- which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company -- show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook's woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season.
While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook's 35,000-plus work force, it was one sign of the resistance that the company is now facing internally over how it treats political ads. Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said. For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions -- which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company -- show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook's woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season.
'This is still our company' (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: 'This is still our company' (Score:2, Insightful)
So 250 Facebook employees support suppressing political posts?
I'd love to see the Zuck go back in front of congress and square the position of those 250 employees with his stated 'hands-off, not a publisher' corporate policy.
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So 250 Facebook employees support suppressing political posts?
I'd love to see the Zuck go back in front of congress and square the position of those 250 employees with his stated 'hands-off, not a publisher' corporate policy.
He should leave the political posts up but with a clear warning with what's wrong with them and why they're left up anyway.
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>So 250 Facebook employees support suppressing political posts?
Slight difference between political posts, and paid, targeted political ads that flat-out lie.
How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:2, Insightful)
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Except it doesn't.
Today, "liberals" will tell you men and women are biologically the same, that race does not exist genetically and is just a social construct, that sex and gender are different, that the polar bears are extinct and the ice caps are all melted already, that the US shouldn't be a world bully, etc. etc.
Yet they're also the ones who want funding for segregated sports based on sex, policies to forcefully increase "representation" and "diversity", who claim minority status for groups x, y, and z
Re:How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep burning that straw man.
There's nutcases on all sides, but misrepresenting them as the norm does nobody any favors
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It's a +2 insightful strawman. Slashdot has become a strange place.
Re: How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:2)
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I'd say it has a conservative bias.
Conservation of energy, momentum, charge...
There are plenty of laws, but liberty is rarely mentioned, just a few degrees of freedom at best.
And one might think that equality (a fundamental part of equations) is a liberal value but that is not the case. With equality comes symmetry, and according to Noether's theorem, symmetry is conservative.
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Since you haven't really mounted an argument, it's hard to actually make a counterargument here. There are biases and there are outright lies. If something can't even stand up to basic scrutiny, it should not be spread around as fact - no matter which side said it.
The facts are that we already know that businesses take the cheapest route possible with regard to protecting consumers. We have organizations like the FTC, CSPC and the NHTSA precisely because we actually do need arbiters of truth. Nobody has
Re:How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:4, Insightful)
There are biases and there are outright lies. If something can't even stand up to basic scrutiny, it should not be spread around as fact - no matter which side said it.
So deal with it like we do everywhere else. Require the politician to put her name on it. Then if it is a lie, she's smeared herself. This isn't hard folks. The answer to bad speech is good speech.
Or, should we just let the Democrat Media continue to call Jussie Smollet a "modern day lynching", and ignore that the President never said that white supremecists were good people?
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Then if it is a lie, she's smeared herself. This isn't hard folks. The answer to bad speech is good speech.
Except that's not how it played out in 2016. The bad ideas just spread and spread with no regard for whether it was true because it sounded good.
Also, they are only putting these fact-checks on PAC advertising, not direct campaign advertising. There is no politician putting their name on it because they're not involved.
Or, should we just let the Democrat Media continue to call Jussie Smollet a "modern day lynching", and ignore that the President never said that white supremecists were good people?
At the very least, these both stand up to basic scrutiny. Smollett was charged with filing a false report, but those charges were dropped - the FBI stepped in to investigate why. No state
Re:How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:5, Insightful)
This conversation cracks me up. Really.
No private org should be the gatekeeper of political speech. The very fact that there is a *potential* for literally one person to decide, what a majority of voters hear/read/think is beyond frightening.
It's madness. Utter and complete madness.
Further, US courts, case law, legislation, and even the constitution have all been interpreted as mostly a 'hands off' in terms of throttling political free speech. At worst, speech *MAY* the throttled after spoken.
Yet people are wanting a private corp to handle this, to decide this? Holy hell!
Whatever happens, it can't be done by corps. Corps which typically have one person at the top, that can make the final call.
I mean really, madness? Are you people MAD. Facebook deciding what's OK for everyone to see?
How can people think it, for even a SECOND?
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and ignore that the President never said that white supremecists were good people
I believe he said "fine people," but why pick nits?
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Because he didn't say that either.
Thank you for demonstrating how easily misrepresentations become the new 'truth'.
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My bad, I should have looked it up, he said, "very fine people on both sides."
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
People who protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue are white supremacists. Whether they consider themselves racist or not, they are endorsing a symbol of hatred that was erected specifically to inspire fear in black Americans and demonstrate local southern governments' alignment with institutional racism. When the government memorializes the man who lead the fight to maintain the institution of slavery, they are explicating
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All I need do is add more context, for instance the follow up statements by Trump:
"No, no. There were people in that rally -- and I looked the night before -- if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. Iâ(TM)m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people -- neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.
"But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest -- because, I donâ(TM)t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didnâ(TM)t have a permit. So I only tell you this: There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country -- a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.
Incidentally,
People who protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue are white supremacists.
Some of them probably are. Some of them are definitely not.
Whether they consider themselves racist or not, they are endorsing a symbol of hatred that was erected specifically to inspire fear in black Americans
What utter bollocks. They were supporting remembering history.
When the government memorializes the man who lead the fight to maintain the institution of slavery, they are explicating their values.
Don't be fucking stupid. Shit, you'll be telling me next that America must expunge most of the founding fathers and several US presidents from the history books. Grow the fuck up.
I think you'll have to resort to some convoluted logic
You should seek support and help if you find this logic convoluted.
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1) A statue is a sign of reverence. It demonstrates a society's values. Supporting the memorialization of a man whose only historical contribution was to fight to maintain the institution of slavery means that you align your values with him. It means you're a racist.
2) Removing Confederate statues (that were built long after the Confederacy) doesn't mean that one is against remembering history. But a statue of Robert E. Lee isn't necessary, or useful, for remembering history. It creates a historical narrati
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It's a fucking statue. It doesn't denigrate anybody. It celebrates a renowned and remarkable General that was admired for his martial skills by all sides in the war. It recognises a man that put his life on the line and led armies into many battles, most of which he won, usually against numerically superior forces. He also fought for the rights and freedoms of his people.
You may not think that counts for much but many people do. You can argue that he fought to deny the rights and freedoms of his slaves, and
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Re: How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:2)
Re: How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:4, Funny)
I take it you haven't been on Facebook lately.
Re: How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not arguing for full-on review of any suspected propaganda, but if something is provably false - it should not be allowed to be spread.
That sounds nice, but it puts Facebook in the well-defined role of publisher, not merely re-printing what others submit. Being classified as a 'publisher' imposes a level of responsibility on Facebook for EVERYTHING anyone posts to the service.
Facebooks prior bad acts prevent them from being able to credibly review and suppress political posts by politicians.
As a 'for instance,' if I got a handful of reputable economists that question the money a wealth tax would raise, could I call politician's claims that
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> Imagine if Facebook suppressed every post where President Obama
When Obama used Facebook in 2012 for his re-election it was applauded as a successful tech savvy sophisticated presidential campaign. In 2016 the same tools used by Trump is now a danger to democracy and privacy.
I really hate the double standard that is paraded by media. They treated Obama with kid gloves and now everything is "end of democracy" even though nothing is really different from the Obama years.
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The similarity ends literally at just the words "using Facebook"
Re: How makes determination of fact and non fact (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not arguing for full-on review of any suspected propaganda, but if something is provably false - it should not be allowed to be spread.
That sounds nice, but it puts Facebook in the well-defined role of publisher, not merely re-printing what others submit. Being classified as a 'publisher' imposes a level of responsibility on Facebook for EVERYTHING anyone posts to the service.
Well, you seemed to have missed that fact that facebook IS planning to factcheck and censor posts made by non-politicians (ie: paid for by the PAC). It's just the politicians (and candidates) themselves that aren't going to be fact-checked and censored. So how does your "that would make them a publisher" argument hold up to that?
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Facebook is already a conservative media platform. The most viewed news articles are usually from people like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.
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Why are conservatives such snowflakes? WAAAH they don't like us! Wimps.
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Right??
Politics has turned into a team sport, where it doesn't matter if you are right, as long as your side wins. This has happened to both parties in America, although perhaps to one party before the other.
I'll light it -- WHAT THE FUCK does that have a goddamned RATS ASS to do with knowingly spreading falsehoods?
Facebook knows best (Score:4, Insightful)
It is, of course, Facebook's moral responsibility to be the arbiter of truth, and to quash all who dissent. We wouldn't want people to have to discuss the issues now would we?
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With such simplistic arguments as yours, we don't need to discuss this issue any further either.
Re:Facebook knows best (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a simplistic argument. The OP in fact touches on a cornerstone of democracy: if you start censoring any speaker based on the truth of what they say, it's fine as long as the truth in question really is the truth. The problem is, everybody interprets the truth differently - including FB, which, for reasons unknown, thinks it has a duty to ensure the speech going through its network is "pure".
What the OP articulates is that, to avoid well-meaning truth-filtering degrading into full-blown dictactorship-like censorship, the best way is to not filter speech at all, and let informed citizen sift through the bullshit themselves. The problem being of course that the citizenry isn't very informed these days... Still, better to let the public discourse's S/N be very low than try to raise it with an inevitable bias.
Re:Facebook knows best (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, everybody interprets the truth differently
The problem with this statement is that there are still demonstrably false statements. You don't have to set the bar very high to still have a threshold.
to avoid well-meaning truth-filtering degrading into full-blown dictactorship-like censorship, the best way is to not filter speech at all, and let informed citizen sift through the bullshit themselves. The problem being of course that the citizenry isn't very informed these days...
No, the problem with this is that there literally aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with all the information. True that citizens aren't informed, but not always because of a lack of education or ongoing involvement with the news. It's because it's literally impossible.
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The problem with this statement is that there are still demonstrably false statements.
Yet, I still hear about Trump Russia collusion, despite 2 year investigation. I still hear about claims that Trump called white supremacists good people, despite that is taken out of context to warp the meaning.
I also see "fact checks" like "Trump claimed that Hillary's harddrive was acid washed" This statement is false. Fact; she didn't use an acid to wipe down her harddrive it was bleachbit. Oh boy that really changes the truth behind the statement but at least it can be spun "Fact check; Hillary didn't a
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Yet, I still hear about Trump Russia collusion, despite 2 year investigation. I still hear about claims that Trump called white supremacists good people, despite that is taken out of context to warp the meaning.
I also see "fact checks" like "Trump claimed that Hillary's harddrive was acid washed" This statement is false. Fact; she didn't use an acid to wipe down her harddrive it was bleachbit. Oh boy that really changes the truth behind the statement but at least it can be spun "Fact check; Hillary didn't acid wash her server.".
This all started with a Trump ad referring to Biden, his son and Ukraine. A politician calling another politician a liar? Wow. News at 11. What's different now politicians are calling on outside companies to do the work for them. Can't have another Trump and can't win elections. So let's disable his analytics, ban him from Twitter, Restrict his ads, defend political violence when it's directed at his supporters and poison the well for anyone that doesn't condemn with enough vigor to convince the Twitter Mafia.
You're arguing both sides. You are complaining about falsehoods spreading unchecked but you're opposed to doing anything about it because of who it might harm.
Still. Some of the things you quoted are straw men.
Yet, I still hear about Trump Russia collusion, despite 2 year investigation.
And? Without collusion you still have complicit cooperation. And without Facebook taking down Russia's ads going forward, they're complicit too.
I'm not saying that there was any cooperation between the two but it still walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. If they did the job right, there wo
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> You are complaining about falsehoods spreading unchecked but you're opposed to doing anything about it because of who it might harm.
I don't like the double standard and I don't like ceding this kind of authority over to any organization because now it's a problem because Trump. If it wasn't a problem when our guy was doing it then it's not a problem when the other guy does it.
>And?
Maybe you don't remember but some of the justifications for the investigation was from media reports. It's a self servi
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What you propose is a viewpoint mostly held by the young.. I remember being
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Not to mention statements that are not 100% clear in their meaning. Try this one out:
"Cell phones cause cancer"
True or false?
Well... that's not quite so simple. A cell phone, powered down, sitting near a person? No evidence it causes cancer.
Smoking a cell phone? Yes, well, the smoke will include a bunch of potential carcinogens... if the other toxins don't kill you first. But technically, yes.
Or maybe the original statement was referring to the radio waves used by cell phones to transfer data and was p
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There are very few things you can label as 100% true. There are quite a few things you can label as false enough that they don't belong out in the world unchallenged. Especially if they were made up or intentionally exaggerated to make a point that isn't there. Straw men are not real men and can't become a real boy no matter how long their nose grows.
What you propose is a viewpoint mostly held by the young.. I remember being there to, there seems to be one undeniable truth and everyone who doesn't agree is just blind, stupid, or self-interested. What is actually is, is that age and experience tend to teach you that life is nothing but grey areas.
If this were true, you would not see so much outright dismissal of ideas between opposing generations. The Fox News crowd literally would not exist if they
Re: Facebook knows best (Score:1)
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Facebook already makes itself the arbiter of truth for everything but political ads. You can report any post as a scam, and then they review it and maybe delete it. They also delete posts about herbalism as a matter of course, even if they are supported by science. Presumably they do this so as not to arouse the ire of the FDA, but if they aren't responsible for what people post on their platform, why do they care?
So on one hand, I don't trust Facebook to decide what's true or not, and on the other hand the
Facebook has become a Publisher. (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook has become curated (sometimes user generated) content, with comment sections.
Between their News, censorship, and all the rest, they've already moved from platform to publisher.
Maybe it would be a good thing if they moved forward with the resistance's demands on this one. At least then it would drag the truth out into the light, and they could be regulated and treated like the entity they actually are, instead of that which they pretend to be.
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Between their News, censorship, and all the rest, they've already moved from platform to publisher.
The four horseman of the Apocalypse and and the Decline of Western Civilization will arrive when we see Facebook news articles posted on Slashdot.
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Regulated by whom, and in what way?
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By the free market when they get sued for printing lies and smearing people.
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That is, by definition, the exact opposite of regulation. I was asking what regulations the parent poster was referring to.
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B. What "regulations" are publishers subject to?
C. Keep pounding away on that keyboard, little boy.
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little boy
Don't call Dmitri a little boy—then you'll really piss him off.
So... (Score:3)
...is Facebook still worth using? I mean, now it's full of shit, officially.
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The alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative is anonymous employees with their own bias judging the honesty of ads, sometimes rejecting them for vague reasons and no appeals process.
Facebook shouldn't be the Internet police.
Re: The alternative (Score:2)
Facebook already IS the Internet police. âoeIf you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.â. â"Rush
Re:The alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative is to do nothing and let the campaigns fight it out in court over libel/slander. If Facebook wants to be a publisher than it should be held to that standard, otherwise the smart play is to go back to being a platform.
Re:The alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
The alternative is to do nothing and let the campaigns fight it out in court over libel/slander. If Facebook wants to be a publisher than it should be held to that standard, otherwise the smart play is to go back to being a platform.
The best course of action (that I'm aware of) is one you actually didn't mention: refuse to act as a platform for political ads of any sort.
You've identified the two ends of the spectrum, but each has its problems. Likewise, the middle-ground option above has a problem as well:
- If Facebook enforces complete editorial control over the content of political ads, it makes itself the arbiter of truth. Cue an endless parade of lawsuits accusing them of bias, libel, and all manner of other things.
- If Facebook enforces no editorial control over the content of political ads, it is complicit in allowing lies to spread on its platform. Doing so diminishes the capacity for meaningful political discourse on which healthy democracies depend.
- If Facebook enforces a no political ads rule, it gives up on receiving all of that sweet, sweet moolah set aside to run online political ads.
Because Facebook isn't about to give up that money and because Facebook doesn't want to set itself up for a suit by being in the middle of sparring matches about what's true, it's unsurprising they chose option 2. It's also unsurprising why we're all upset about it, since, regardless of the tribes to which you belong, it's in the best interests of honest people everywhere that lies never spread. Our ability to have honest political conversation is undermined if the "facts" we're working with are not factual at all.
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The best course of action (that I'm aware of) is one you actually didn't mention: refuse to act as a platform for political ads of any sort.
You've identified the two ends of the spectrum, but each has its problems. Likewise, the middle-ground option above has a problem as well: - If Facebook enforces complete editorial control over the content of political ads, it makes itself the arbiter of truth. Cue an endless parade of lawsuits accusing them of bias, libel, and all manner of other things. - If Facebook enforces no editorial control over the content of political ads, it is complicit in allowing lies to spread on its platform. Doing so diminishes the capacity for meaningful political discourse on which healthy democracies depend. - If Facebook enforces a no political ads rule, it gives up on receiving all of that sweet, sweet moolah set aside to run online political ads.
Because Facebook isn't about to give up that money and because Facebook doesn't want to set itself up for a suit by being in the middle of sparring matches about what's true, it's unsurprising they chose option 2. It's also unsurprising why we're all upset about it, since, regardless of the tribes to which you belong, it's in the best interests of honest people everywhere that lies never spread. Our ability to have honest political conversation is undermined if the "facts" we're working with are not factual at all.
The other problem with your "middle-ground option" is simple: how does one define a political ad? How does one prevent a political advertisement ban from bleeding over into bonafide political discourse?
It sounds like a simple distinction, but it looks more convoluted the more you look at it. There's not much difference these days between a political ad and a political newsfeed posting accept for one thing: money changed hands in exchange for more eyeballs seeing it. If it's the money's role in it that's
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This publisher/platform dichotomy keeps getting parroted but it's a rather strained logic to assume that any amount of moderation makes a website a "publisher" rather than a "platform." By that standard, every website except some dark web free-for-alls is a publisher.
Furthermore, the issue at hand here is how advertisements are treated. That has nothing to do with a publisher/platform distinction.
Re:The alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
The alternative is anonymous employees with their own bias judging the honesty of ads, sometimes rejecting them for vague reasons and no appeals process.
Yep. That's the only alternative. We can only have one extreme or the other. Definitely can't only reject provably false ads or anything like that. Definitely can't have any appeals process. Do you work in political advertising by any chance?
Re:The alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. And would it be you or the 20-somethings working at Facebook that would get to decide what they truth is?
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I certainly don't have the time to fact check everything myself. Maybe rejected ads should be made publicly available and people with more time than me can check up on their work.
Re:The alternative (Score:5, Funny)
I'd prefer a 16 year old climate activist to do it.
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And she'd get it more right than most people.
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She's on the spectrum. She would have loads of domain-specific knowledge and could probably do a good job within that specific realm of information.
It would be great if we had lots of domain-specific learners fact-checking everything out in public discourse (or what's really publicly sharing whatever sounds believable). It only becomes a problem when it's not subject to public scrutiny. If nobody knows what was censored or filtered, we have a problem. That information needs to be public.
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This is a pretty good illustration of where we are at as a species. Really this shouldn't be a problem because the assumption is that people will punish a candidate who is lying to them by voting them out of office. However we live in a society where people literally don't live in the same reality as other people. There exist people that don't believe, but KNOW that Seth Rich was murdered by the DNC in exactly the same way I know that your user id is 30919.
We can't agree that anyone is sufficiently unbia
The "Internet police"? (Score:3)
Facebook doesn't control "The Internet", FYI. They do control their websites/services, and are entitled to run those any way they see fit, so long as they don't run afoul of laws. If you think that Facebook = The Internet, then you really don't understand what the Internet is.
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Facebook shouldn't be the Internet police.
I agree, but that should be because Facebook shouldn't be synonymous with the internet, not because they have no TOS.
Who decides what is "false"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, what is WAY worse than false claims, is fraidulent conceslment and other forms where what *isn't* said is the lie.
And how about people who actually don't know better.
All those things apply to watchmen *too*, by the way.
In the end, only one *personally* can do that job for oneself.
Letting somebody else do it, only works if you aren't an individual, but choose to be that one's drone.
And *doing* it "for" someone else, is *always* manipulative.
The core problem is something elss entirely:
We do not teach in schools, what a trauma is and what a trigger is. Let alone triggers we aren't even aware of!
We do not teach the basics of how our brain works, how our very very relative and intentionally biased model of reality, logic and the scientific method directly emerge from that. Nor the essentiality.of feelings as the mother of all thought and motivation (Source: Dr. Antonio Damasio), including logic, and how emotions and actions and new associations emerge from it.
We do not teach growing a personality of your own, based on picking exactl what you never questioned, to make up your own mind, so you actually *chose* how you see things and who you are. Nor the general skill of problem solving.
All this here is just draping a big blob of The Thing in your living room with cloth and throw pillows and calling it a solution.
Just FYI: I didn't troll. (Score:2)
I'm sorry if it seems too much or too controversial for some.
It was not my intention.
I find those topics the most interesting. Sadly, they also stir up the most discussion and triggers. They need to be discussed anyway, I think.
Life is better (Score:1)
Commies Hate Uncontrolled Speech (Score:1, Insightful)
Using Facebook as a polical platform.. (Score:1)
Check your EULA (Score:2)
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I missed something (Score:2)
Protect the Politicians (Score:2)
Don't let people see what kind of odious lies any given politician is likely to spin. Protect the politicians from themselves. If they bring up something that hasn't been declassified yet, don't let them say it online. Ron Wyden, especially.
-JRC
IS this even an issue? (Score:2)
Federal law mandates that broadcast networks cannot censor political ads from candidates running for office.
While Facebook is not a broadcast network, I would bet a court would hold that the same law applies. IANAL though. So this seems like a non-issue, even though everyone loves to criticize Facebook.
The one thing that is hard to ignore.... (Score:2)
employees be careful (Score:2)
Facebook will wring it's hands and talk nicely and quietly work to assassinate any change to the system. Employees that don't like it can keep their heads down or find themselves "redundant".
Down-rating incoming in 3...2.....1....... don't like the truth eh?
Moderation's not always clear (Score:3)
I've moderated for a few forums and chatrooms over my life. You get a lot of stuff that toes the line and it's not always clear what the best thing to do, no matter how many policies your website has. Obviously, a lot of major tech companies have highly liberal-leaning staffers, so that's going to be a factor in how borderline content plays out, but I doubt they're doing it maliciously or on purpose. You also get a lot of cases where two people might judge the same situation differently and community members only see that you're not holding people to the same standards.
My personal experience has led me to believe in a least-force approach. If Facebook wants to throw up notices saying "we think this is false based on [link]," I don't mind that because people are free to check that link and determine for themselves if they think it's reliable (and maybe it moves the discussion closer to a place of truth-seeking, which would be good), but I know personally just how imperfect and biased moderation systems are and that's why I think that it's best to try to avoid getting rid of content and just letting people talk it out for themselves. And that's not a knock on moderators, it's just the nature of moderation and human nature generally.
They believe ALL the other team's posts would be (Score:2)
Taken down as lies and NEVER their own team's.
Sure, let's have nameless, faceless, unaccountable minions taking down content they disagree with, or can "prove" are lies for various values of false.
"Almost half of all X do Y,,,;'
FALSE... 47.2% is not "almost half" Take it down!
"Many people believe that..."
FALSE...I don't know anyone who believes that, take it down.
Do it and watch them scream when takedown (Score:1)
notices start flooding the ether as their own team's ads are marked for some falsehoods.
Watch as the spin approaches Snopes levels to create "Mostly True" or "False but..." rationale why their team's posts should not be taken down, while the other tea's get taken own for flimsiest reasons.
TL;DR (Score:1)
Wait a minute (Score:2)
So you're saying that politicians take out ads that are misleading and "even false"? Wow, you're kidding. News at 5: Politicians will do anything to get elected. This is new under the sun. No one ever lied to get into office. No one ever lied in office.
What a stupid moral high ground we stand on, and to think we want to hold the people who want to have power in this country to such a standard.
Here is your new story from Facebook:
All political ads warp reality to their point of view. They also will li
Its a good policy, however (Score:3)
The reason even false political ads need to be allowed to have free speech: Is that the concept over whether something should be considered a "False Ad" is very much a matter of opinion; Usually it will be especially activists and those politically opposed to the position taken by those advertising to claim an Ad is bogus or false.
Such descriptions as "Fake", "False", or "Fake news", for example are commonly used by those harmed by some legitimate information.
Not all messages or claims can be proven completely true or false objectively. Very often you can have claims which are disputed, and many people who disagree will say that it is false.
For example: 1. "Climate change is a serious problem caused by excessive CO2 emissions from industry"
For example: 2. "Climate change is not something humans are responsible for"
Neither of these two example messages Is currently provably true nor false objectively, but is disputed, And of course people who are on a particular side of the politics will definitely claim either (1) or (2) to be false, depending on their personal beliefs, especially if they are hired as a moderator of Advertisements.
BEFORE You consider suggesting whether Facebook, Etc, should try to suppress "False" political Ads --- I think you should first ask yourself the question "Which Ads will be rejected by whichever of the Facebook moderators support the Republican candidate?" Then repeat the same question again for each other political party that has an extremist view which may decline YOUR political side's advertisements with a claim that they are False.
Re: (Score:2)
How was this handled in the past? (Score:2)
How did print newspapers handle false political advertising in the past? I'm unclear why this problem is new. *Gasp* Were politicians honest at some point in the past?
Basic Monopoly Problem (Score:1)
The burden has always belonged to the audience (Score:2)
It is always on the audience to judge the content of advertisements, and the audience has always known it. The stakes may be higher with politic
Re: (Score:2)
It is reasonable to expect FB to verify the veracity of a political ad?
I think it's reasonable to allow it. To some degree. Even better if there is a place for the public to view all rejected ads (with all applicable disclaimers).
Non-political ads are already covered by the FTC, equal housing laws and many others. Facebook is actually required to be involved in that.