> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table...
Do you have a problem with political ads on tv? From my perspective we should have campaign finance laws that regulate political ad spending, but there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
> ... there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Facebook is different than television because ads can be targeted extremely narrowly. This makes them hard to audit and possible to use ads for things like voter suppression of populations that are likely to vote a certain way.
Advocating for/against a specific policy or politician is one things. Attempting to disenfranchise a group of people through misinformation is another.
Agreed, but the idea that any publicly traded company can or will have ethics is an equally absurd idea. I tend to think of companies as Darwinian machines whose evolutionary 'fitness function' is the maximization of profits.
Gotta remember what's most important. /s