In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise.
This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.
The lowest level of truth telling is stating facts, but even stating facts can be extremely manipulative.
If I were to say:
"2x as many white Americans were killed by police as black Americans in 2018."
This a true fact.
If I take note of the fact that black Americans only constitute 13% of the population, then I can say
"A black American is 2.3x as likely as a white American to be killed by police."
This is also a true fact.
So not only are facts capable of telling a narrative, but it gets much more complicated once you start introducing conclusions.
If you say "A black person is 2.3x as likely as a white person to be killed by police in America. American police are being racially discriminatory when killing civilians."
This is a fact and a conclusion, and most news consists of facts and conclusions. Both the fact and the conclusion serve a particular narrative, and that's an issue. The problem is that a news organization with a different set of objectives, or simply operating under a different framework, would be entirely capable of coming to an entirely different conclusion, or introduce entirely different facts alongside it.
"A black person is 2.3x as likely as a white person to be killed by police in America. However, despite making up only 13% of the population, black Americans committed 36% of homicides, with an overall much higher representation in violent crime across the board. Only 5% of police shootings are with an unarmed victim, with the rest resulting from an armed altercation."
Different narrative.
In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
But these really aren't the type of lies that people consider fake news. Yeah, all the things you've written are facts, and their interpretations are what we call opinions. I agree with you that all of these statements, since they're true, should be allowed without a question. People still need to think and be critical.
I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President. It has nothing to do with facts like the ones you've stated above. These are simply lies. You can't argue that it's some interpretation, or just half of the picture or anything like that. It's simply a bunch of words phrased as a fact but they never happened.
I can't see anything good coming out of this for any country. It ruins the ability to have a real debate in a society, and I think it harmed America (not only of course) greatly.
And one last thing - yes, it probably shouldn't be one person from one political side that decides what's completely false and shouldn't be published (or perhaps better, be corrected), but I don't think it should be so impossibly complicated to create a system in which representatives from all sides can do this together. America already has structures like this implemented.
This. The march to authoritarianism accelerates when people accept the meme that the truth is unknowable. So they simply accept the reality put forth by the autocrat.
The most basic kind of truths are facts. We at least need to agree on those as best we can first. And then apply critical thinking on the the squishier stuff on top.
Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened.
So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.
Maybe we need to start teaching people to habitually attach provenance and confidence information to every fact (really: belief) they report, at least as much as practically possible?
"Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs", etc.
A lot of problems are caused by people who say "X" when they should say "I strongly believe X", or "I think I read somewhere that X", or "I'm not sure, but I think X".
I generally speak like this and find it causes problems with others because they view this as a weak form of speech. It makes you appear uncertain, which should be a good thing, but our society seems to value undeserved confidence far above cautious uncertainty.
I find it helpful to spend a bit more cycles on keeping track of audience and a bit fewer on perfect conveyance of certainty levels.
Once you've set the bar re: certainty for a particular discourse neighborhood, you can just make claims at that level thereafter without feeling dishonest. As long as you're sensitive to cases where others may have joined without enough context to know that you're out on a limb.
Yes- intellectual dishonesty is at the root of this. When I was raised, the integrity of a "man's" word was a measure of the "goodness" of the person. Now, we hear things like "he said what he had to say" and a basic acceptance of lies if the person is on our side of the debate.
I've tried to get into this habit. Qualifications are great too because when someone comes back to say "you said X! You lied!" you can remind them of how carefully you qualified your statement.
This is Circle of Competence applied[0]. It's admitting what you know you don't know so you don't make mistakes by being overconfident.
It's even more than that. By qualifying your statements, you let others evaluate them correctly.
So, for instance, if 'tptacek here says a factual statement about security (and there's no large thread contesting it), I'll treat it as gospel. But if he says he's unsure about it, or he read it somewhere, I know to attach less weight to it. I'll code in it my brain as "uncertain, but passed the sniff test of a relevant expert". Etc.
The same principle works in more mundane aspects of life. Whether a person believes something (and how much), or whether they're just reporting something they've read elsewhere, matters a lot for evaluating a factual statement independently.
The one thing with this is that you have to be consciously careful of who you view as an authority on different subjects, or whose opinion on something is relevant. For a simple, everyday example, it's easy to follow a friend's recommendation to eat at a particular restaurant, even if that friend has completely different tastes in food than you do (which, in all likelihood, will result in a poor dining experience for you). Likewise, I think even smart, educated people often make the mistake of treating the word of powerful individuals as fact even if those individuals have absolutely no experience with or authority on the matter.
The world s autocratic countries (russia china turkey etc) don’t rely on fabricated news, they rely on hiding the truth and placing a biased spin on it. They know that outright lies will actually harm their image.
And killing journalists, and imprisoning political opponents, and controlling the media and, yes, straight up lying, because no other voice can be heard, so it's impossible to publicly fact check their lies.
That's a few autocratic countries. Such a statement is obviously not true in general. For starters you have dictatorships which have been based upon absurd and shameless lies. North Korea currently, Haiti under Papa Doc, Turkmenistan under Niyazov. In addition I'd imagine hiding news is the first line of defense, but if that fails none of these autocratic governments are not above lying (and I'd bet you find the dictators of those countries have lied many times when it suited them, if evidence is available).
But if the truth is unknowable, how does the autocrat know it?
I've only met a few people who are skeptics about the existence of facts--but I find that they're likely to be skeptics about other things too.
I think that if it's a position you arrive at via honest philosophical inquiry, it's not a hazard at all.
The position to be wary of is where you still believe in the truth, but are so beleaguered by the cacophony of voices claiming to know it that you're willing to accept that somebody else has access to it if it means that you get to just peacefully be on their side and don't have to bother sorting through it all anymore.
That is too say: claiming to know the truth is often a proxy for being too intellectually lazy to bother forming a good argument, and I think that nihilism is preferable.
Sorry but no, the sides cannot work together to dispassionately purge only clear falsehoods.
Consider this case, hot off the presses. Yesterday Aaron Sorken wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in the New York Times in which he stated the following:
"And right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son. Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo. That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth."
Really? Sorken knows for sure that Biden was not self-dealing? Joe was totally not thinking about his son's half million dollar no-show job with a corrupt Ukranian firm when he ordered the Ukranian government to fire the guy who was investigating it? Wow, that's a really amazing level of access to the truth!
No doubt Sorken has heard and completely believes the mainstream narrative: the prosecutor was himself corrupt and all right-thinking people wanted him removed. (Never mind it's entirely possible that this narrative is true, AND Biden was self-dealing.)
My point is not to convince anyone that Biden was self-dealing. My point is that Sorken is calling objectively false something that is clearly plausible.
This is how it goes. Most people are invested in narratives, and they are keen to suppress ideas that counter their preferred narrative. The idea that they will somehow draw clean lines between facts an interpretations has always been a foolish hope.
Wait, but if I know the story well enough, Trump didn't say that Biden might have offered Ukraine $1B. He simply said that he promised. And as far as we can all know, Biden promising $1B to Ukraine isn't a fact. Is it plausible? Sure. Can Trump suggest that it's a possibility? Of course. But had Trump suggested that Biden might have given $1B, people could judge it for what it is - an assumption. Instead, he presented it as fact, which it simply isn't.
It seems to me that truth isn't so hard to find when one actually looks for it.
My theory is this is exactly the value proposition various news companies provide - they do it for you. "We give you the Abstract and the Conclusion".
If anything, that -hampers- critical thinking. It removes the need to apply logic and deduction to stuff that happens and just accept provided explanations of outcomes.
Would we trust a Scientist if they only explained background and results of their experiment, and didn't discuss the actual methodology and analysis of what they did and how they did it? How is that much different from being a Magician? Or saying, "Trust me, I know I'm right"?
>I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President.
The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.
>You can't argue that it's some interpretation, or just half of the picture or anything like that. It's simply a bunch of words phrased as a fact but they never happened.
"Russian collusion" appears to fit this description, yet I still read about it every day.
The entire political game is composed of stretching the facts to control the narrative. If you see it as one-sided, you're not paying attention.
> The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.
Your divisive thinking is the problem here. Someone said that Trump lies, they didn't say "Republicans lie and dems don't," but that was somehow your interpretation of the statement that Trump lies (which is true of any president, yet you and I both know in our heart of hearts that he lies more than anybody by an overwhelming margin).
I believe the parent was mistakenly interpreting "lies told by your president" (emphasis mine) to be a #NotMyPresident kind of attack from a citizen across the aisle as opposed to an observation from a non-citizen. It sounds like the parent thought gp was a democratic who was insinuating that the current president and his political party are the only president and party who've told lies so egregious compared to those told by any other president from across the aisle that they're the only ones of consequence.
That's what I assume, but you know what they say about assumptions.
I know trump tells a lot of blatant lies (I think most Americans recognize this), but if you’re a Trump fan you’ve been hearing Democrats calling Trump a traitor, a dictator, a Russian-pawn and colluder and a criminal long before any of those titles could be considered “facts” (they mostly still cannot be called facts, though the Ukraine call may have changed that).
Yes Trump tells a lot of lies, but I also think each side of the aisle tends to ignore their own hyperbole (or at least fail to appreciate when the other side is hearing “lies”)
It's simple reciprocation from game-theory perspective: when the other party lies and gains advantage, you do it too. But I feel Republicans are way more untruthful than the Democrats and simply bring down the level of discussion for everyone.
And I don't know why is it, that majority of Americans are so accustomed to lying that they tolerate it from politicians. In Finland if politicians get caught with outright lying, it's career-ending if it's bad enough. Prime ministers have resigned over it, party leaders seen their polls slump. In US if Republicans are caught lying (Democrats too I guess to lesser extent), it's a simple distraction and meh from public. Their supporters don't simply care and I guess are not capable of criticizing their own party.
I've been recently thinking that what US has now isn't that far stretch from a single-party system since the parties in power don't really have to fear losing their support. There are no other options, so they can just pass the ball between each other, putting up a show and doing whatever since people can't really choose anything else. If your only option is picking between two assholes, which one you pick? And when the population doesn't know to demand change, what will happen? Nothing.
Yes there are advantages with two-party system, but what I see it has really rotted the political discussion and ideologies into two boxes that can't possibly overlap. In multi-party systems coalition governments can be bit sluggish but at least they offer people a real opportunity for change, and letting go of the old, obsolete power structures. For a country that is so keen on free-market and unrestricted competition, you are awfully restricted in your choice of political parties.
I know Trump is in a world of his own, but most often the “lies” are not lies to the speaker or the speaker’s fans. For example Obama’s “if you like your plan you can keep it” regarding Obamacare. It turned out not to be 100% true. To Democrats he was well-intentioned and over-optimistic and couldn’t deliver his promise (probably due to Republican obstructionism) while Republicans had always considered that a lie.
If 50% of the country believes something is a lie and 50% believe it’s mostly true, is it really a lie? The truth is most political “lies” are only considered lies by the opposite party.
From what I heard about Obamacare it seemed a quite crappy deal indeed, and not really criticized properly by the Democrats. It's sad that either party can't acknowledge their own errors and have to just tout their own version of reality to make it true for their supporters.
And about lying, there are degrees of lying that can be established. The earth is not flat even though some believe it to be so, to state the opposite is untrue. On the other hand, sure you could say eg that Americans have obesity problem (compared to the rest of the world) or they are just normal weight as "only" 1/3 of the population is overweight. But which is a truth or a lie?
I think the problem is largely a cultural shift in politics where the issues have become secondary to the rhetorical war between the two opposite ideologies. It's not about establishing a truth in a sense than it's trying to beat the other party. Yet there is a consensus that can be established, honesty that could be had when stating facts and acknowledging their up and downsides. It's not just black and white wordplay.
Perhaps we should just get rid of the politicians, have our best scientists (preferably chosen at random from a pool of candidates) run the government and people would just vote on things that they wished to improve (immigration, job-safety, healthcare etc). All results would be evaluated afterwards and their effects measured with meticulous statistics. I know that it could be abused too, but even that would be better than what is the current situation in US government.
Obamacare was hardly what Obama or the Democratic party wanted originally. They arrived on the final system only after two or three years of negotiation in Congress and intense corporate propaganda towards the American public regarding health insurance. I've only seen PR and advertising of that level previously during elections. So of course it wasn't perfect... It was very much a compromise with the powerful and well-funded healthcare industry.
The problem with the political culture in Washington isn't the rhetorical war. It's politicians obsession with being reelected. The culture is that no indignity is beneath you if it's for the sake of reelection. Lindsey Graham was once known alongside John McCain as being a RINO by partisans, 'Republican in name only'. Now he acts like Trump's dog on 99& of issues.
The reason? So he can be more influential on that 1% of issues he cares most about. If he doesn't get influence on that 1% (like we saw with Syria) then he breaks with Trump, because he has a bottom line: the set of issues he wants to influence. This is true for all politicians. They have a political calculus where they are willing to sacrifice legislation or points in certain areas for the sake of being able to affect legislation in most other areas. Functionally this means that politicians do things like accept big campaign donations in exchange for going easy on a certain sector. I believe most politicians want to do what they think is best for America, but that comes with a single constraint--that they're the ones accomplishing it. And that comes with a hefty cost.
I have a hard time believing Obama truly believed a plan could be kept. Given how it works, I just can't imagine how you could reform healthcare in any meaningful way without outright terminating some of the plans as they existed. I don't have a particular problem with it. Which is probably true for most -- they care more if their leader is acting ethically and trying to do the right thing, than how (pedantically) honest they are being. If Trump lied "I support Confederate statues" to get elected, and then led an effort to tear them down, I doubt history would have any issue with his lies.
> "Given how it works, I just can't imagine how you could reform healthcare in any meaningful way without outright terminating some of the plans as they existed."
I'm just spitballing here but... grandfather in all existing medical insurance contracts unless the individual chooses to terminate the contract. Let the insurance industry bank on the fact that the number of grandfathered contracts will only trend down over time.
Maybe it would hurt their profit margins, but how much hurt? Probably not enough hurt to knock down the industry is my guess.
From personal experience the issue we have with fake news is not caused by a president. It was the polarization from the 2016 election, which has resulted in people valuing the narrative over facts. Nothing was a clearer example to me personally when later that winter as I was participating in a conference located in Stockholm, which had a track title "Fake News", with an invited keynote speaker who was a previous board member of the wikipedia foundation. The keynote talk was made to present a narrative that media had failed to present information to the voting population about trumps scandals, and as evidence there was a image from a study showing survey result about what people knew about each candidate and their scandals. The conclusion was that if media had done their job then obviously the election would had ended correctly rather than electing Trump.
The numbers were extremely biased against Clinton and fitted the narrative so perfectly that I got a bit suspicious. Looking at the recording of the talk afterward I noticed that the evidence had a reference printed inside it. A moment later I had the paper itself, and what do I find above the image? The researcher explicitly saying that anyone reading it should not draw any comparable conclusions about the numbers as the survey operated during a period of 9 months. The researcher noted that if they had done a new short survey closer to the election date then the numbers would look very differently. It pretty obvious that people can not answer a survey with knowledge of scandals that occur in the future.
Fake news will continue as long we try to make facts fit a narrative, rather than first looking at the facts and then construct a theory about the world.
I still run into people convinced "leftist infighting" turned the election rather than the handful of votes in three states that really did it. People need better civics education. They find out about the Electoral College and can't believe it exists, or that a handful of votes for one person can offset millions of votes for the other.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not leftist strongholds, where "infighting" might allow the Other to win, but people prefer the narrative that "Bernie Bros" ruined our beautiful democracy. Clinton got millions more votes, but it didn't matter. The Electoral College turning it doesn't fit the narrative they've been fed that people further to the left are responsible.
You're right about polarization though. Less than 100k votes wouldn't matter if the country wasn't divided right down the middle. Choosing the future of our country shouldn't be a matter of who can influence a coin toss more.
My very first check of that assertion has a fully "True" rating of 20%[1]. And if you count the entire true spectrum it's 73%. And there is not a small sample size. I assume your statement is only regarding the current executive branch?
I also tried a spot check of the Congress, but my very first check also failed to meet your criteria[2]. The problem with this is that it undermines your entire point. The executive branch has the most strained relationship with objective reality, and that stems from the demands of the current president. They're basically forced to lie for political reasons because the truth is too damaging.
Aah, my browser addons blocked the lower list, so I only saw the 2 Executive Branch and the 4 Congressional Leadership.
Off the two democrats congressional Leaderships, Nancy Pelosi has 14% and Charles Schumer has 11% in the True category. This in contrast with the republicans that has 12%, 0%, 10% and 5% (trump).
Every president has lied; they have reasons to do it. Maybe it's to avoid revealing classified information, or to gain a political or geopolitics advantage. It doesn't matter; lying is an essential part of statecraft.
Yes, it does feel in large part that it's the crass and blatant nature of Trump's presentation that enrages, not just the actual content.
As a Canadian I 'preferred' Obama, who ran on the line "change you can believe in" -- but he led the US empire substantially the same as any previous... and so this "can believe in" line, it really expresses a truth. The substantial piece was not that America would change, but that you could _believe_ in the fact that it would change. Little actually changed in America, at least from a distance. And once people stopped believing in the change... one gets Trump.
Disgusting as he is, Trump really is "changing" America. And his lying is more transparent and blatant and crass, but also more theatrical and aggressive. It's weaponized.
>It has nothing to do with facts like the ones you've stated above.
I don't think I can agree with this. When dealing with one group who is using facts to push a narrative/conclusion you think is false, it can become quite easy to push back without outright lies. Once misleading facts have been introduced into a discussion, the level of civility drops. That opens the door for the further drop into outright lies. Especially if one side feels they are less versed in manipulating statistics.
I've spoken to many people who view lies of omission as being just as dishonest as outright lying, especially when done to manipulate someone (normally this involves when a child has lied to their parents and isn't related to anything political). As such, a lie of omission or selectively using facts has now introduced dishonesty into the conversation, making the other side feel like they are just using the standard that was already been set.
>It ruins the ability to have a real debate in a society, and I think it harmed America (not only of course) greatly.
I feel this occurs as soon as someone starts relying on presenting facts to push a certain narrative because it sends the message that it is now acceptable to have a dishonest conversation. At that point, any discussion changes into a matter of winning at any cost.
> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making.
That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest – which is a nice way of saying that the weakest get eaten or die. I don't want to live in a society that has these values.
> That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
It's based in European, and more specifically, British Enlightenment thinking, the apotheosis of which (with regard to freedom of speech) is On Liberty[0] by John Stuart Mill, an Englishman. To quote:
> THE TIME, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the question, besides, has been so often and so triumphantly enforced by preceding writers, that it needs not be specially insisted on in this place.
It appears his hopes would bring disappointment were he still around.
This to me seems not far from ayatollahs quoting scripture to justify their positions and policies. Surely thought has progressed in the last two hundred years?
Unlike ayatollahs, not only did your parent not suggest the person they were quoting was right, they actually suggested the person they were quoting was wrong: "It appears his hopes would bring disappointment were he still around."
You're confused about the point your parent was making. Let me try to explain the context to you:
Top of thread: we think this way in Denmark (a country in Europe)
Reply: we think this way in America
Reply: "This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. ... That is a supremely American way of looking at the world."
Your parent: actually this way of thinking comes from Europe
Your parent is not saying this way of thinking is correct, only that your grandparent is silly to call this way of thinking "supremely American" and imply that it's inferior to European thinking.
> Surely thought has progressed in the last two hundred years?
Nope, that’s not how it works. People consistently keep retrying ideas for government and economics over and over because they get tempted by promises while ignoring history because “this time it’s different”.
"This time it's different" was exactly the answer the liberals gave when propounding their system. It is also the answer mathematicians gave every time they tried to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Contrary to popular belief, "this time it's different" is a very good way to go about progress, so long as there is good theoretical reason to believe there could be a difference in application.
It has, but due to the orthodoxy of thinking in terms of the liberal conception of human rights in the US Constitution, other voices aren't listened to much - their views are different to the orthodoxy such that they are considered heretical and against liberty.
It's a circular argument in the sense that because liberty and freedom are defined for the mainstream framework, any outside framework, in order to be accepted by adherents of the mainstream framework, must provide a vision compatible with the existing framework.
We're stuck in a hole in terms of what can be done outside academia in the real world.
Downvoting is not being wrong, it is being disagreed with. It is a win in my book if you ruffle some feathers in your opinions, it means you’re not just restating the majority belief.
In terms of a graphical model, voting is dependent on not only opinion but also motivation. Somebody that thinks you’re wrong is more motivated to downvote than someone who thinks you’re right - one has an ax to grind, one does not.
I learned this principle early on (and I think it's an unfortunate facet of HN as compared to, say, Reddit where Reddiquette is that one does not downvote for mere disagreement) though I also learned that HN is a place with a great deal of intelligent people who enjoy to think about problems - presumably, there would be some reason behind the disagreement. HN threads are known for pessimism and critique, so it's curious when a HNers feathers are ruffled they don't say anything.
Though, you're right - I think a lack of reason given for disagreement itself can reveal something interesting - not only that they may not have a reason, but that they can't articulate the reason well enough. In real life we often don't voice disagreement for either of those reasons. In my view, HN is no different.
> and I think it's an unfortunate facet of HN as compared to, say, Reddit where Reddiquette [...]
You are not supposed to downvote when disagreeing. You are also not supposed to complain here about mod votes. You should read HN netiquette and email them instead.
Btw, down voting based on disagreement happens on Reddit just as well. Reddit is a bunch of smaller, semi autonomous communities where quality differs. You could even say quality differs per HN thread.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The former obviously applied.
As for the latter, while you didn't comment about HN turning into Reddit, I'd say comparisons in general fit this rule.
> It happens, but at least it's against the etiquette of the site as set by the admins - various subs may have their policies, true.
AFAICT it happens rampantly, and far more than it does here. That is my very subjective experience, I'm sure everyone has their own, which is why such a discussion leads to no good. It isn't objective/unbiased, nor intellectual.
Where exactly ayatollahs talk about people rights and free speech? Comparing J.S. Mill to a bunch of religious maniacs is a bit far-fetched.
The fact that Mill wrote those words 200 years ago does not mean they are incorrect. We stick to the rules of Roman law in many aspects, although it was written pretty long time ago. Pythagoras formulated his theorem quite long ago too, yet we still learn it at school.
There are certain ideas that seems to be universal, that just make people lives better. People tend to challenge them and thanks to that we get goodies like Communism and Nazism.
If you're looking for quotes from smart, dead, non-white guys I have this one from Frederick Douglass:
> To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Not that their being smart, their ethnicity, nor their being alive or dead has any relevance to the content of their speech.
Aside from the obvious rebuttal already given by pointing out it's not American to think the press should be free, further "payload" was in the link provided. I'd encourage you to read, what is in my opinion and of many others, the greatest work on freedom of speech.
> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body
No. It wouldn’t. When that kind of power (arbiter of truth) is placed in a single point, that point will become the highly contested point of control. Eventually, inevitably, the body would end up turned to some ruthless power of the day, and would serve as the most phenomenal propaganda machine.
“The Ministry of Truth is pleased to announce that bootlace production is up a thousandfold this quarter, due to the heroic efforts of the King. You may now cheer.”
Total decentralisation is the only sane route - you build a bulwark out of billions of human minds, and you build inertia into your system such that emotional volatility led by events or propaganda efforts is smoothed out.
This is basically the concept of democracy and electoral cycles - group consensus on what reality is and how it should be responded to, with a temporal buffer (the election cycle length) to smooth out rash decisions.
Our systems need amendment to better smooth our inherent volatility, which has been provoked by our exponentially growing sphere of information - but this can’t come at the cost of handing control over something as fundamental as the idea of truth to some technocratic committee. That’s how you end up with gulags.
Edit/addendum:
Further musing on temporal smoothing of volatile and labile humanity led me to recall the idea of Concents in Anathem - groups are sequestered away for a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium, and are allowed only at those intervals to interact with the outside world. This monkish dedication to record preservation minimises informatic drift within the group, and provides a continual negative feedback factor to the unstable curve of truth, thus preventing the rewrite of the past, and therefore the present and future.
Ok, so a centralized system is as smart as the people working in the Ministry of Truth, but also creates a highly contested point of control. It's not guaranteed that it'll be smart, but ideally it can get as smart as possible for human beings.
A decentralized system is not controllable directly, but can only be as smart as the mean of the population[0]. Also, it also has a mechanism of control - propaganda. It's not all that effective, because you can have competing groups countering one another, but the side effects of that are relevant here: people take sides and reason by soundbites, while facts and critical thought get crowded out. Which means the more competing propagandists you have, the dumber the system becomes, even if all propaganda attempts cancel each other out.
So, on one hand you have a system with a very good quality ceiling but easy to manipulate; on the other hand, you have a system more resistant to direct manipulation, but consequently with a much lower ceiling that that also goes monotonically down as attempts to manipulate the system increase. Or, in other words: good results with high risk of bad results, vs. consistently shitty results.
Can't we do better? Are we doomed to choose between only those two?
--
[0] - Assuming a normal distribution, by the central limit theorem. If that doesn't hold, things could get even worse.
Machiavelli said something similar about principalities vs republics. Its hard to kick down the door of a principality but if you do, you are now in charge of a system designed and accustomed to keeping you there. You can always find a way to grab some power in a republic, but the entire system is designed to unseat you at the first sign of unrest.
The issue is that influence matters more than the average or median in themselves - although oversimplified and "catchy" ideas tend to be favored more. This doesn't neccessarily mean dumb is favored per se - promoting say eating criminals would be an overwhelmingly unpopular idea even without constitutional limits.
They aren't guaranteed to be smart or just (sadly there probably isn't anything which qualifies) but they are are stable in a "not likely to piss off everyone into an insurrection" way.
> that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person
For being the most powerful person, he doesn’t get much done and is in the process of potentially being impeached. Sounds like an argument in favor of the checks and balances and an argument in favor of less power being concentrated at the federal level in general.
> publicly broken all the norms and all the rules
Publicly broken “all the rules”, really? Methinks you’ve been drinking some koolaid.
> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies
Absolutely not. A ministry of truth that dictates what people say and answers only to politicians is about the worst and least imaginative solution to the problem.
> What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest
False dichotomy. State-level governments in the US are very capable of handling many of the responsibilities that have amassed at the federal level.
If you think more centralization is better, why not have a single world government that decides what is true? The government choosing what is true is working pretty well for China, why don’t we just let them take over control?
> You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making. That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Literally every government and civilization in the history of the world has eventually failed or been corrupted.
Given this inevitability, how is it not better that citizens have protections against a failing government abusing that power? Avoiding centralization of power is one such protection. This is not an "American perspective", it's a simple conclusion reached after looking at history.
Why do you think the centralized body would say that to fox and not to cnn? After all if there are about 50% people thinking that fox spreads lies and 50% people thinking cnn spreads lies the decision of centralized body could go any way.
It is better to let everyone speak and everyone to make their own decisions
> It is better to let everyone speak and everyone to make their own decisions
Majority of the people simply trust the media they like or get used to. They usually assume news from these channels have been fact-checked or are trustworthy but we all know messages can be crafted in different ways.
In other words, the media can potentially/likely manipulate how people think and make decisions.
>They usually assume news from these channels have been fact-checked or are trustworthy
I think this is irrelevant. People will listen to what they like to hear or what matches what they already think. NOBODY is exempt from this, I dont care how smart you think you are.
One of the great ironies of the state of media in America: almost everyone agrees that Fox News is extermely biased and sometimes dishonest. Yet CNN, ABC, CBS, NYT and MSNBC are bastions of truth.
I mean, just a few weeks ago ABC posted a video from a Kentucky range and claimed it was fighting in Syria[0]. Is that simply horrible journalism, or a lie?
I think you may be in an echo chamber. Most of my coworkers watch fox news. Its even playing on tvs at work in the hallways and cafeteria. People chat about their latest dose of truth and the outrageous lies of cnn etc. I listen to npr on the way home to get the sam facts in a different light/bias and then resolve to ignore everything but local races. I wish high offices were still elected by lower offices down to the lowest of offices where all the voters actually know the people they are choosing between.
Not sure if you're referencing the constitution's original intent for state legislatures to elect senators. If you are, here's a good reference for anyone interested in the topic:
People who pay attention know that fox news is fine and sticks to the truth (perhaps a selective truth, but still truth). It's the editorial panels that run around it and look like news that are a pile of made up lies.
Why would you expect someone calling for tighter regulation of the media to give a free pass to CNN? I would expect regulators to be a thorn in the side of any commercial television network. They're in the business of selling entertainment for profit, not upholding community standards of truth, decency, etc.
>Why would you expect someone calling for tighter regulation of the media to give a free pass to CNN?
The side doesn't really matter, what matters is giving that power to government will lead to one side winning and entrenching themselves via said power. I believe it's better to let free citizens learn wrongly on their own than to pretend government can teach the so-called right things.
I strongly prefer what we have now to the authoritarian "society" you have described. It sends shivers down my spine to think that there are westerners advocating such things. You can always move to China, they have everything you sound like you want
> Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
Have you ever considered the option that you might be the one who is disinformed? European media have a tendency to "group-think" and to extrapolate certain narratives to the extreme. For example, I observe that even reputable German news outlets like "Der Spiegel" put a negative spin on every single story about Trump. My guess would be that the Danish media is simiarly biased given your views. And apparently, your laws did not prevent that from happening.
Well, if you read factcheck.org or any other fact checker, or just read transcripts of Trumps speeches you can see that the negative spin is usually there for a reason.
The problem is that a centralized body immediately becomes too powerful. The body itself would need to be limited in scope with other outside checks and balances.
SCOTUS is close to one of these centralized bodies you speak of, and they purposely only deal with cases that have gone through every other avenue. And even then, they are not trying to determine truth, but only fit the verdict within the existing body of law. I would prefer less decisions being decided in this manner.
I prefer giving power no secrecy to hide behind and limiting it by democratic control. I dont know why the assumption is always that a central power has to be some opaque inscrutable beurocracy.
I don't know why the assumption is always that a democracy is incapable of tyranny. Gay marriage had been illegal for most of our modern democracies' histories under the tyranny of democracies. Prostitution and drug usage are currently illegal under the tyranny of democracies. In England the manner in which you discuss large scale immigration or transgender issues, or what pornography is acceptable to watch is subject to review under the tyranny of democracy.
Trump has been able to do very little, and this is a good thing. However, what he has done is effectively demonstrate that the executive branch has too much centralized power, not too little.
In regards to whether or not it would be great if we had a powerful centralized body that could determine what constitute outrageous lies worthy of a fine, no, for the reasons I've already stated, I do not think that this would be a good thing. I have no problem with European and Asian countries granting their (very often highly competent) governments greater authorities than what is afforded to the US government, but I think it's supremely important that there remains at least one superpower fundamentally predicated on a mistrust of a central authority.
Trump has accomplished much more than you think he has. He has done a good job of using controversy to divert people from a great deal of the significant changes he has made via executive authority to the various government agencies under his control.
> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
I mean his arguments is the basis of the the separation of powers. It's only American insofar as American democracy was inspired in it's founding by the enlightenment thinkers.
Yes but that only works if they say something bad about someone or something. If they only tell positive lies or completely make up things it's hard for anyone to prove standing, much less show damages.
But it still has a negative effect on public discourse. It's like information pollution.
Would this centralized body extend to regulating bloggers and YouTube personalities? It's tricky to draw a line based on scope - influencers and personalities will grow ever more popular, and conspiracy rabbitholes will only grow more decentralized.
How would you deal with foreign media that violates the laws? You'd either have to permit them - which opens up the country to foreign meddling, since they can and have spread propaganda - or sanction/block them, like Russia and China (and Australia.)
Also, suppose despite your best efforts, Trump still gets into the White House. He's installed loyal yes-men in many departments already - if they defy him, they'll resign under pressure or be fired. He'd easily gut this Ministry of Truth and weaponize it to quash CNN/NYT or even climate scientists.
I'm quite on the left and not averse to regulation or centralization, but it's wishful thinking to assume this "powerful centralized body" is going to do the right thing.
See, for example, the use of corruption taskforces in many countries to purge political rivals or even honest bureaucrats who won't take your bribes. Corruption should be illegal, allegations should be investigated but things can go very wrong and these checks perverted against their intended function.
Media regulations do exist, and are more robust outside the United States. Usually the answer to your question about bloggers and YouTube personalities is that they are ignored by the regulators of the professional media, but may attract police attention in extreme cases under anti-vilification laws that would likely be unconstitutional in the U.S., eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan (UK), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blair_Cottrell (AU).
I don't see the problem with subjecting foreign media to the same or even stricter laws. Yes, it's difficult to enforce the law against foreign nations, especially your friends, so enforcement often doesn't happen. That doesn't mean that foreign meddling ought to be made legal, which would be a step backwards in view of laws like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_....
Looking at how fast the Republican Senate became supplicant to Trump, the separation did not turn out so "separate" after all due to the concentration of parties.
>>> This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making.
This should be basic assumption of the all laws. Remember early 20th century and legal takeovers of governments by warmongering maniacs in Europe?
It was legal, there was trust toward government. All it took was a single group to take over Germany and start WW2.
Even if no one will abuse the law currently, you have absolutely no guarantees(as democracy is popularity contest) that no one will try to abuse them in future.
>> That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Not really, it is very prevalent in Europe too - especially Eastern Europe which suffered under Russian communist occupation. Mostly because it was the case in those countries - the populace still remembers government actively working against people.
>> Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
>>> How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
It works perfectly... for those in power. From citizens perspective it is a nightmare.
>> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What prevents this centralized body from making politically motivated decisions? If we go to the extremes we have examples in history - heresy trials, censors in communist Russia, and even current example - China.
One could argue for centralized body of such power in only a single case - system transition by force with benevolent ruler that will dissolve itself after transition.
> What prevents this centralized body from making politically motivated decisions?
An established institutional culture of apolitical service, reinforced by respect for those who uphold it and consequences for those who violate it. The kind of thing that the U.S. still expects of its military, judiciary and public service, and the kind of thing that is corroded by political leaders showing contempt for it.
The US works by checks and balances. You can't point to, for example, the US military and say "see, we have the expectation with the military so it will transfer." You have to say, "See, the world holds respect for <$Centralized_Power>'s military despite centralized power."
Finding the value of $Centralized_Power might take a while.
> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but in all honesty, how do you feel this is working out for the US at this very moment?
There is obviously an upside and a downside. The platitude that "freedom isn't free" is something that seems to be lost on critics of the effects of liberty.
I don't think the free speech absolutism present in the US was ever meant to suggest that there isn't such thing as undesirable speech, but rather that the potential for tyranny under regulated speech is a danger well worth avoiding at any cost.
In addition to that, America is a country that works forwards from principles much more often than European nations, which very often work backwards from objectives. To frame the right to free speech in regards to whether or not it is "working out" is not a particularly American frame of reference. The principle that individuals should express themselves as they see fit, and that this is the foundation for a free and open society, is essentially square one.
>In addition to that, America is a country that works forwards from principles much more often than European nations, which very often work backwards from objectives.
Have any examples to back this up?
I dont even necessarily disagree with your original argument, but can we get away from the Europe vs America debate that always pops up on this board as if they can be compared in a reasonable way? Europe is made up of a bunch of independent countries alot of which have objectives and principles that conflict with other entities within Europe, let alone outside of it
The "America vs Europe debate" only ever pops up when an American comes into a thread telling everyone how wrong they are. As you say it is ironic because the position that there is one "Europe" to compare the US to is one that can only be formed in an environment of ignorance. Asking why was at some point useful, but given the pernicious nature of these discussions and the vehemence with which they are repeated we have to assume they are not going to go away (unless perhaps we ignore them).
>>In addition to that, America is a country that works forwards from principles much more often than European nations, which very often work backwards from objectives.
>Have any examples to back this up?
This is an example to backup the statement. The US starts from a strong principle of free speech. European countries generally don't value this as highly, and will censor speech if they feel it is necessary.
> To frame the right to free speech in regards to whether or not it is "working out" is not a particularly American frame of reference. The principle that individuals should express themselves as they see fit, and that this is the foundation for a free and open society, is essentially square one.
When I said "working out", I wasn't talking so much about which effects free speech is having (although that is a question well worth asking) but more about whether speech in the US really is as free as it was ~4 years go.
Could being attacked on twitter by the president for something you say not be construed as a very real retaliation by the administration and thus a curtailment of free speech?
You aren’t being thrown in prison or “disappearing” for saying something counter to the president’s point of view. Even with free speech rights there are still limits though. I can’t go around making violent threats to people without some repercussions.
> Could being attacked on twitter by the president for something you say not be construed as a very real retaliation by the administration and thus a curtailment of free speech?
No, someone talking to you in a public forum, even in a hostile fashion, is not a curtailment of free speech. It’s just free speech.
Free speech isn’t the right to not have your feelings hurt.
If Trump attacking people worked on Twitter, there wouldn’t be any democrats left in office at this point.
> I'm not trying to be snarky, but in all honesty, how do you feel this is working out for the US at this very moment?
Great. We still have many of the rights others have been stripped of. We haven't faced any invasions or domestic warfare in over a century, we have the worlds strongest economy, etc etc. Best of all, we can say pretty much whatever we want and not go to jail for it.
>>> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
In my honest opinion - every law should be made with assumption that in the future, or even now, an actor will exists that will abuse it to the utmost limits.
One of reasons i am vehemently against article 13 in Europe, or anti-hate speech laws(as those can be abused to basically turn into censorship laws - while doing absolutely nothing but hiding the symptoms of systematic problems).
I'm really surprised that _this_ isn't a more popular take-away among Trump detractors, particularly with regard to things like privacy and government surveillance. "Finding the right balance between security and privacy" sounds a lot different depending on who's mouth it's coming out of and who controls the levers.
This is a strawman argument. You don't have to define truth absolutely to ban news from spouting outright lies. The US seems to have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to be frank, the US should probably be more wary of that.
It's not a strawman for multiple reasons. For one, you have suggested that pointing out outright lies does not suffer from many of the same issues as asserting truth.
"American jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants from Mexico."
Is this a lie? No. But is this disingenuous and misrepresenting much more significant contributors to job loss? Yes. Is it a lie then?
"Transgender women are women."
Is this a lie? Depends entirely on definitions and presuppositions.
Secondly, I think the more important takeaway is that the vast majority of the issues we're having in regards to political discourse have absolutely nothing to do with us not agreeing on facts. Neither side for most of the hard issues are relying on outright incorrect facts.
So not only do I not think that identifying outright lies is as simple and free from bias as you suggest it to be, I also think that the cases in which this could be universally agreed upon would contribute very little to the majority of serious political discussions happening today.
You don't have to capture every biased statement and bending of the truth to counter outright lies like "Obama was born in kenya" or "Trump was endorsed by the pope"
Both of which are believed by huge amounts of Americans.
> You don't have to capture every biased statement and bending of the truth to counter outright lies like "Obama was born in kenya" or "Trump was endorsed by the pope"
You do if you want to make some kind of law about it. You are correct, there are plenty of instances where a story is blatantly false and could be taken care of by some kind of preventative action. But the distribution of possible lies is extremely long tailed. For every one of these instances, there are dozens where it is not entirely a lie, but not entirely the truth, or is biased, or a half-truth, or editorialized, or an extreme conclusion, etc. Libel and slander laws already exist, but are rarely invoked because of this reason. It is nigh impossible to create any kind of system or legislation that does more than what these laws already do, while also properly dealing with all of these edge cases.
I mean, even your examples could easily get around any kind of preventative measures by couching their language. Instead of "Obama was born in Kenya", it could be phrased "rumors have begun to circulate that Obama was in fact born in Kenya". The desired effect of planting this lie in people's minds is still successful, but with a few words there is now no way to create a framework that legally prevents people from spreading lies that way, that is also consistent and not overbearing.
This is the most important comment. Whenever i hear about someones saying that "XYZ should do something about fake news" i understand that they really dont understand the depth of the problem. Solving "fake news" is a non-trivial problem and no single arbiter of truth can tackle it, Facebook, twitter etc are claiming about "cracking down of fake news" but all that is just hogwash.
“Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor. The prosecutor said he was forced out for leading a corruption probe into Hunter Biden's company.”
Yeah Why not? It’s pure narrative without conclusion.
another source, in this case the ny times, would be equally free to publish the statement:
“Vice President Biden was overseeing American policy toward Ukraine at the time, and he did push for the removal of the country’s top prosecutor, who was seen as corrupt or ineffectual by the United States and Western European governments. But there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden or the oligarch who owns Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
That’s a quote from the ad that people wanted Facebook to disallow for being a “known lie.”[1] Just pointing out that the policy that people are pushing for on Facebook is quite a bit more aggressive than whatever law you’re referring to.
In addition to the point made by the sibling comment, these facts are consistent with an attack on Joe Biden for having an apparent conflict of interest, even if there was no evidence that he intentionally, corruptly used his power to benefit his son. (If he did, would you expect there to be any evidence?) Ethical public officials are expected to avoid apparent conflicts of interest.
This is a perfect example of something I have been thinking about. Facts are funny things: Consider that if the media was pro-Trump for example, they would have omitted the "But there is no evidence" part. The opposite is also true. Since the media is nominally anti-trump, they must sway the story by including the no evidence part
It's indeed true that the prosecutor said that. Whether what he said is true, is another thing.
The problem is that it doesn't only matter that stated facts are correct; it matters also that people reading them interpret them correctly. Natural language is messy; people jump to conclusions also because often we do communicate intentionally by hiding meaning between the lines.
That's kind of besides the point though. He was showing that even when printing things that would be considered legally truthful, you can still maintain a narrative.
> It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
But maybe my English wasn’t good enough to carry it through.
I don’t think narratives are a problem as such. People are allowed different opinions in a free society. Our laws are there to prevent people from printing things that are outright false, but these laws are being circumvented on the modern media platforms because they apply to editiorial staff but not private citizens.
Which is a problem in a world where influencers have more viewers than news papers.
But "narratives" about actual facts it's just bringing on your view of the world, and that's perfectly normal (even if I may not agree with it). The big problem here is spreading information based on invented, not actual facts.
Obviously you can still manipulate real facts and tell a lie (like the classic photo cropping example): that should be prohibited as well.
I don't disagree with most of what you say, but I do disagree with your implied conclusion.
Setting a baseline of limiting/banning provably false information is a good thing. Yes, it doesn't stop all forms manipulation of people towards any given agenda, but it certainly doesn't make it easier, and means things have to be at least slightly anchored to reality.
You can frame facts in different ways, but you can also tell things that contradict known facts - ie, lies. It's the latter that shouldn't go without consequences.
In Austria we have a body that regulates this and it kind of works. We still have various levels of quality, but flat out lying is far less common than in the US or UK.
The body consists of a board of all media agencies and they self-regulate their behaviour and adhere to their commonly agreed principles (e.g. if you get facts wrong, people can demand follow-ups with a correction etc).
In my eyes the US has a ideological perspective on many issues, that are basically "solved" in other democratic nations (with gun-law beeing the most shining example). I accept that you cannot directly apply solutions that work in one nation to another without reflecting the differences in culture and law, but it happens all too often that Americans claim something can't be solved, while it works perfectly fine somewhere else, without having sacrificed neither democracy nor freedom.
When it comes to media regulation, it is a question of law and enforcement. If you don't trust your own courts to objectively judge what accounts to a violation and what does not or is ambiguous (like in your examples), then you have a problem with your justice system beeing influenced by politics and the principle of the seperation of powers is broken.
> but even stating facts can be extremely manipulative
Another thing is the choice of facts you decide to state. All media have a bias in what type of news they decide to cover. Usually they pick stories based on what their audience wants to hear. I don't think there's a solution, besides trying to be more critical about medias in general.
The naïveté of - in particular Western Europeans - with regard to an ultimate truth handed down by ‘official’ bodies is mind boggling. Getting closer to the truth is a process not a static decree and accepting and dealing with the exact opposite viewpoint to your own - especially when it hurts - is part of adulthood nurtured by free thinking individuals in a free society. Learning about deception and lie, manipulation and propaganda is an extremely important and never ending learning process. (Disclaimer: I am a Western European living in the US)
But from what I've been taught in school, news articles should always aim to state only the facts as they have happened without trying to draw conclusions, show only one side of the story or inject the bias of the reporter.
As long as you have journalists and editors able to do their jobs, stating facts doesn't become an exercise in pushing your narrative as you describe but simple reporting of "what happened" or "what has been said". In your specific example, you would report only on the actual statistical figures released, without trying to inject probabilities or percentages which are pushing your analysis and view of the data.
News outlets are then free to print articles containing opinions, studies and conclusions, but this are called editorials and not news articles, and by definition they do carry the opinion of the writer and his/her innate bias on the matter.
Even in this case, saying something false is different from interpreting the data or facts at hand. For example, you could write and publish an editorial examining the same statistics as before and come up with the conclusion that there might be a racial bias - some people might agree, some people might not, but it's still an opinion based on hard data and doesn't contain a lie. If you, however, started saying that it's all a plot orchestrated by the reptilians running society to make you think that there's a racial bias, that would indeed be a lie with no factual basis and should be punishable.
There are facets and sides to every story you tell, but reducing everything down to the point where you conflate news reporting, opinions and lies is, imho, stupid.
News is a lot like statistics. Just by which facts I show (and don't show), and how I show them I can push the reader to a certain conclusion. Even the wording matters. A great example is reporting on the stock market. "Market plunges 500 points!!", but the reality is that's ~1.8% and barely a blip.
> If you say "A black person is 2.3x as likely as a white person to be killed by police in America. American police are being racially discriminatory when killing civilians."
> This is a fact and a conclusion, and most news consists of facts and conclusions.
Journalists usually quote somebody else for the conclusion, they don't use themselves as a primary source. And if they're good they get multiple quotes from different people to give a view of the differing opinions.
American understanding birthed a society that openly fosters fascism. It should only be used as an ironic example, not as some sort of highroad ethical argument.
This is just whataboutism. Banning political ads does not affect whether people can misrepresent truths. Preventing lies does not affect whether misrepresent truths.
However, banning political ads on Facebook does ban political ads on facebook, and banning lies does ban lies.
Tech is not some magical playground disconnected from reality. Time for SV to grow up and engage with society and politics - they’re not an “optional, inefficient” part of life.
Danish lawyer here. We have rather usual defamation laws regarding libel and slander. I am not sure they differ from other European or American laws in any way that hold Danish media to higher standards. Even publishing true information can be a violation of our criminal code, for example certain information about private life or about past criminal convictions.
All in all, though, I believe we have wide freedom of press and freedom of speech not unlike what they have in the rest of Europe and in reality not that different from what they have in the US. Yes, we do have a media liability law which makes the editor (or even the journalist or the publication) liable for defamation in the content and for publishing certain information about a person's private life. The effect is that Danish publications are forced to worry about defamation against persons or corporations, or groups of people such as certain statements regarding religions, ethnicity etc or about information regarding persons' private life.
But apart from what I describe above, newspapers can publish more or less whatever they want without fearing criminal or tort liability. They mostly have to fear ridicule. A Danish editor will not be held liable if his newspaper writes wrong facts about the unemployment rate, crime, business climate, taxes or just about anything else that is in the news.
I believe the answer to why Danish media still have a decent standard despite free online news and Google and Facebook getting the ad money, is found in the subsidies. Virtually all large media in Denmark are either public entities or private entities that are heavily subsidized. By far the largest Danish media is the national radio and TV station. All the large newspapers receive huge subsidies. They simply still have budgets to pay for journalism.
It is very easy to print things that are true but still have a bias. For example, printing things that are true but good about one political party, while printing things that are true but bad about another, is a bias. Almost every news medium has some kind of bias this way, and I think it affects their impact more than if they simply tell lies or not.
(Counter to the current worry, it seems to me that outright lies in mainstream publications are actually somewhat rare. When they happen they are generally corrected. Though there is a recent trend of rushing to publication to appease an overly emotive audience, getting things wrong, and then having to correct days later, after everyone's already been influenced. NYT especially.)
This used to be somewhat addressed in the US television segment by taking it even a step further, and requiring news shows to not only be truthful, but represent both sides of controversial issues. It was called the Fairness Doctrine [1], but it was revoked in 1985.
If you ask me, that‘s a good thing. If the stakes of an ad campaign with fake news or hate speech would be having to run a disproval campaign of the same size, on the same audience (if you are proven wrong) — I‘d be fine with it. Political ads weren‘t the problem. A complete and utter lack of regulation for the medium was.
> They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise.
Sigh, I wish news could work out in a level-headed, respectable manner like that.
Instead we have “news” reduced to opinions-of-the-day, fat middle fingers shoved in faces to rile up attention (figuratively speaking), and clever ways of turning current events into enticing blockbuster rollercoasters of reporting with crafty “news-scaping”.
(Not all news is like this, FWIW. When information has to be reluctantly peddled for a pittance, like news media is stuck with begrudgingly trying to get people to buy their holiday fruitcakes, then the etiquette of pride in truth gets tossed).
I can twist that, and indeed I do, by quoting somebody telling a lie. I'm positive infotainments do it all the time: such and such people said that the Earth is flat because so and so.
People are so gullible, and some would argue that if they fall for things like that, it's on them. In my opinion, Twitter is getting into a muddy situation with this: what is "political", what is "advertising"... and what is "paid", are all terms that could have different interpretation.
One could argue that Twitter may have just said "hey you, if this is illegal, send a court order and will take it down, otherwise everything stays", forcing governments to actually define what goes and what doesn't, instead of relying on for-profit companies to tell us what we can see and what we can't.
You can present facts differently to manipulate opinion - even simple things like percentage vs percentile, or increases chances by vs to - and even if they lie, the correction won't be reach everyone who read the original article.
Then there are opinion pieces - which by definition are opinion not facts.
I seriously have no good idea how to regulate that: international or national certifications are bound to be abused(lobbying in case of former, national interest in case of latter) and current system is absolutely dogshit.
Honestly it is because all news outlets optimize for one thing only - money - and money nowadays comes from one thing mostly: selling ads, or to be exact - selling access to serving ads to people with specific interests.
As long as selling ads en masse is the most profitable options the current system will exist. Clickbait/Yellow journalism will thrive as long as it's only purpose is to attract attention.
The idea that we can mandate people telling the truth is laughable.
The reason it seems to work in Denmark is probably because honesty is a social norm there.
Secondly, there is no absolute, objective truth and there never will be.
The best we can do is to individually strive for telling the truth and hope for the best.
You accept that honesty could plausibly be a social norm in some countries, yet you think it's laughable that the law might play a role in establishing and upholding that norm?
This sounds like a nice, but dangerous idea: who decides what the truth is? Obviously some statements are blatantly false (2 + 2 = 5), but those don't need to be forbidden by a law: just ignore it, or laugh at it, and let the paper editing this lose its readership (or reduce it to the community of 2+2=5- believers).
The actual matter is for controversial statements. I very much prefer those statements to be allowed, discussed, debunked if needed, than outright forbidden. In liberal democracies, the press is generally considered to be a needed counterpower (along with the establish executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state). Putting it under the control of the judicial power kind of weakens it.
Truth. Yes. Problem is that sometimes the truth is very, very inconvenient for someone (important), then it is forbidden, called lies or conspiracy theory or hate speech.
Before Snowden we had some conspiracy theories that NSA is spying on everyone, but those who claimed that were ridiculed.
Before the communism fell the truth that Polish officers were murdered in Katyn forest by Soviets was considered a lie (official "truth" was that Germans did that) - this truth was so annoying that for a long time (until 1980ties) even Western countries official policy preferred lies only to maintain good relations with Soviet Union.
For a quite a long time (till 1960ies) people thought that this is a good idea to check if shoes fit using X-rays. The truth of that times was that X-rays used in that way are safe.
And I can go on like this for hours.
People lie, people make mistakes, people have shady interests and motivations, human knowledge is restricted. If we enforce official "truth" we never learn the truth. Maybe this will help to keep societies in peace (in the Orwellian way).
Communists tried that, luckily they failed. Chinese half Communism half Confucianism tries that now, we will see how it will end up.
The definition of truth is quite a complicated one because truth is substantially a social construct. I wonder how this law works in practice.
The main problem about social platforms, IMHO is not rubbish information, that's everywhere including printed press. The problem is plurality. Internet was supposed to actually solve this issue, but centralised, obscure and algorithmically controlled echo chambers have reintroduced it.
The problem is, as always, when you put too much power into the hands of one entity...
> I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.
Why should it be treated any differently than other media?
What we need is a return of the Fairness Doctrine in the US (and something similar to the EU) and application of the policy to social media advertising and news outlets. It won't stop foreign psy-ops, but it will stop a lot of the internal-originating lies and deception.
The question is always if the cure is worth than the disease. It is easy to fall into the Politicians Syllogism, and wind up adopting a terrifyingly bad policy out of a sense that something must be done*.
Choosing to wait and observe is always a viable choice, to be considered alongside all forms of intervention.
The recommendations algorithms have access to all our past interactions with these sites. They know exactly what we like and dislike. In order to keep us hooked they keep recommending content that we will continue to watch. There needs to be regulation of this both for news and mental health reasons. What happens when a recommendation algorithm in order to increase ad revenue keeps recommending depressing videos to a depressed person?
We also get politicians which the one who gets the most attention wins elections, because internet is an attention economy. It does not mean that getting as much attention as a possible for a politician means that you have good intentions. Never in our past have companies have had access to information which keeps us mentally hooked to their services. There need to be some kind of safety standards.
> I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.
Why doesn't the laws apply for Facebook? Ads are something they are profiting from, therefore implying involvement and thus
Has Facebook reached the point where they could be fined for simply hosting untrue content? They curate and don't show everything so the argument of being just a "market of ideas" rings untrue.
> In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise.
The problem is, who gets to define what's truthful and how do you quantify the bar for "truthfulness"? This is a deep philosophical question that doesn't really have a satisfactory solution at this point. Some cases are "obvious", but laws shouldn't be written with just the easy cases in mind.
> This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
This is incorret. Anti-vaxxers and anti-vax protests have existed since the inception of vaccines back in the 1800s [1]. Flat earthers for longer.
It's a convenient narrative that the internet somehow created these anti-science movements, or somehow spread them, but that's not really supported by facts. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy arguably spread that message far more than people talking with each other on Facebook.
Many of the flat earthers I have interacted with are actually doing it tongue and cheek as performance. It is a meme/troll many levels deep if you look into it.
You do realize that saudi arabia, china, russia, etc all have laws in place to hold newspaper editors responsible for printing "truth" right?
> This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years.
What makes you think you are a well-informed and critical thinking society? Don't most danes think alike just like most saudis, chinese, russians, etc. Don't most danes think and believe whatever news/propaganda tell them to believe just like saudis, chinese, russians, etc?
> This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
And? Did the world end?
Do you realize that there was a time when it was "truth" that the earth was flat? Do you realize that there was a time when "pro-vaxxers" were ridiculed as much as anti-vaxxers are ridiculed now? If people like you were in power, we'd never have any progress.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer or a flat-earther. The easiest way to discredit them is with speech. More speech, not less. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And free speech is the best antidote to falsehoods.
Denmark has a population of 6 million people with a homogeneous culture, ethnic composition (87% Danish descent, [0]) and physical location. Many problems are going to be faced to all Danes simultaneously.
It is much easier to construct a shared agreement on what is true in such an environment. That they are a democracy is less of an issue than the fact they all face a very similar environment and can probably agree with each other on what the truth is because they are all looking at the same thing.
There's no requirement to have a "homogeneous culture" or specific ethnic composition in order to have a working democracy. Facts are facts, and with a free press, can be seen by anybody, of any race or culture. The real problem is with authoritarian cultures (which are an aspect of humanity, not specific ethnicities) imposing themselves on ordinary people.
> The Danes who wrote those laws were elected by the citizens in a fair and open democracy
Not really comforting to a slightly smaller minority that didn’t vote for them. A democracy is not a panacea and that’s why the US has the bill of rights to raise the bar on changes to fundamental rights.
> One that is transparent, progressive and highly respected around the world.
By whom? People in other countries don’t give two shits about judicial interpretations of laws in another country.
> That Denmark has one of the lowest rates of corruption in the world.
Corruption is orthogonal to government structure. Massively oppressive regimes can operate entirely inside their own laws and not be corrupt.
> That Danes are free to pursue information elsewhere (as in the entire internet) if they don't like whats available locally
Are they allowed to spread said information? If not, that’s not significantly better than the arrangement in China.
1) Right. And the holocaust was perpetrated by germans who were elected by citizens in a fair and open democracy.
The extermination of the native americans were perpetrated by americans who were elected by citizens in a fair and open democracy.
You seems to have a naive understanding of democracy. People always forget that the nazis won elections. People forget that the greatest evils ( genocide, atomic bombings, etc ) were all perpetrated by democracies.
There is a reason why democracy is called tyranny of the mob.
2) Just because you say they are "transparent, progressive and highly respected around the world" is meaningless. There is nothing inherently good about being "progressive". Once again that is a naive understanding of progessiveness. There was a time when nazis, communists, etc were viewed as progressives. But most importantly, just because they are "competent" today doesn't mean they are eternally competent. You do realize governments, judiciaries, etc can change right?
3) That's because they are filthy rich due centuries of european colonization.
4) Are they?
> But besides those things, you're right. It's just like the situation in Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. /s
It is just like that. Do you know how I know? Saudi, chinese, russians, etc all "self-congratulatory" excuses for why they need censorship. Just like you did.
To you, denmark may be heaven on earth, but to me denmark is nothing but a nazi collabotor who got off easy after ww2. Also, if denmark is so saintly why are the inuits in greenland ( the land you stole from them ) doing so horribly?
>Do you know how I know? Saudi, chinese, russians, etc all "self-congratulatory" excuses for why they need censorship. Just like you did.
First of all, I'm not Danish. I don't know why you assumed that.
Look, the OP simply said they have a system whereby proven falsehoods need to be corrected in the newspaper. That's all. They just have to correct mistakes that can be proven demonstrably false.
> In 2004, 2005, and 2009 Denmark received a joint first place in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders.[5] Since 2011, Denmark has consistently been in the top-10 out of 179 countries in the index and it was fourth in 2016.
For some bizarre reason you equated that record with the Saudis, Chinese, Russians and (most hilariously) with the Nazis. Your hyperbole is lazy and ill-informed.
And no, Denmark isn't perfect. No country is. I never claimed otherwise. So don't bother the straw men. The topic was freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A topic for which modern Denmark has an outstanding record.
>> Do you realize that there was a time when it was "truth" that the earth was flat?
This is a bad argument that ignores the concept in the GP post, that of intent, and instead addresses an unchallenged point that humans don’t know everything yet.
> You do realize that saudi arabia, china, russia, etc all have laws in place to hold newspaper editors responsible for printing "truth" right?
We don't have any laws on the books in Russia that forbid newspapers from telling lies I am willing to bet neither does China or Saudi, because that's not needed for authoritarian censorship.
Boris Nemtsov got shot in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. They don't need laws
You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them. Not giving them a voice in the public discourse. Not taking anti-vaxxers seriously and placing them at the same level as doctors because ''both sides'' and ''free speech''.
What has been proven again and again is that bad information drives out good, because it's so, so much easier to write bad information. So you need to keep a tight lid on people who spread actual bad information. If not you might end up as the US, with a reality-tv star as president.
>You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them.
I would like a source on that. Dont take it personal, but I dont see how this is anything but tanky signaling to feel better about yourself. Here in Germany people were rather active in making sure the new far right party AFD wasnt given a platform. By now they are very close to being the strongest party in multiple states. All that deplatforming did there was giving them a quicker rise. You cant deplatform a large sections of society, you are only creating a stronger echo chamber for them by trying. And i have to remind you, the echo chamber only exists because we didnt want to talk to these people. Deplatforming attacks the people not the ideas behind them. Nothing good can (or ever did) come of that. On the contrary, it only strengthens the community under attack and gives them an enemy to connect over. The only reason its attractive again as a tactic is because its easier. Convincing people through a discussion is hard work. I am very much afraid of the day when people are no longer capable to have a discussion because they have forgotten how due to living in echo chambers their hole life. I dont have high hopes that large parts of the left still know how to convince people with arguments, which in turn doesnt give me high hopes for the future. So yes, pls dont fuck us all over I am really not interested in another Reichstagsbrand because people liked how they viewed them self when working on deplatforming.
In summary, if you don't explain to people what the flaws are in their ideas and arguments are they may not ever discover them.
Deplatforming makes it look like their is no logical or moral counter. It is not an explanation of why the ideas are bad. Platforming and debunking is reasonably likely to expose bad ideas as weak.
Too many words to convince that guy. It is funny how one can tick people in thinking high of themself. For instance, they usually don't have a clue about vaccination, AI or climate but they know that there is a trend and as long as you keep the currently popular opinion, you will be on the right side. Up to them, the rest are dumb fucks and should be deplatformed. Obviously, most of them never worked in science and have no critical thinking which develops while reviewing hundreds of papers where people (mostly) lie in order to get things published.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Why do people constantly evoke this these days? People quote it like its scripture. Is there supposed to be some self-evident truth in there? Because I don't see anything that counters the ideas of person you are replying to.
I worked on modding a political forum from its laissez fairs days to its current operating philosophy.
Bad speech regularly frowns out signal, and in times of crisis, will overwhelm the channel with emotion.
It’s easier to make vague funny one liners which reach the top of the page, drowning out that 8 page report on the telecom industry.
Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.
Once the channel is overtaken, crazier philosophies start opening up - nationalism, religious cleansing, minority targeting.
Start moderating to keep the demons away?
The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.
Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.
The people are still the same and they are still around, all you did was keeping your livingroom analog clean and your existing userbase from being replaced by racists. We dont have that luxury with society at large. These people dont just vanish once they are no longer on your site.
Thats a theory which I dont see much evidence for. Let me give you another theory about its effect. I would propose, that at least since the rise of the internet deplatforming leads to people getting pushed into far right echo chambers. I think its not just ineffective, its highly counterproductive. This unreflected feelgood nonsense is fueling the growth of the far right.
Since you brought it up, lets look at the topic of ethnic cleansing and how deplatforming would treat different people and what the result is. Say someone was never interested in politics or isnt that old and has some naivete left traveled to an area with extreme ethical or religious conflicts witnessing it first hand. An intimate view of decades old conflicts where parts of the civilian population are at each others throats and in some places even the threat of massacres is still very real if it werent for massive police or military presences. Take your pick from northern Ireland to some places in the Balkans to the variety of African conflicts with an unimaginable level of hate in some areas. Picture school children needing a police cordon on their way to school to escort them through screaming protesters because they have the wrong ethnicity or religious affiliation. Once people are personally affected or witness something they find atrocious they get motivated to think about it. How could the situation be improved? Talking with the people in the region he hears a specific mantra very often. As long as we still live door to door this conflict will continue. So the persons asks himself what could be possible solutions? The current situation is clearly intolerable to anyone with a sense of empathy. The person reads up on the conflict and its a decades or even century old issue. Quite alot was already tried, you can read books upon books of articles how the situation might be improved and about the numerous campaigns that were already completed. And still here we are today. So what were other regions that had the potential for ethnic conflicts but which are now resolved peacefully? A short look into the history books and you learn this was often achieved by deportations. You might not even have to look far, the formerly German provinces in Poland or Czechoslovakia dont have a any conflicts today, on the contrary. So apparently moving one of the groups is the solution. Sure this was often accompanied throughout history with atrocities, but back then horrible regimes and dictatorships were in power, now we have a properly functioning governments, those atrocities are a day of the past. Just horrible stories from the darkest days of humanity. We never had such a peaceful period in Europe and everyone knows we reached the end of history. So why not relocate one group and ensure permanent peace? So he asks, why dont we just deport every xyz in zyx?
My worry is, how many people on the left are still capable to explain to him why deportations and ethical cleansing are not just not a reasonable thing to do? Why his conclusion is wrong? Instead of just screaming Nazi and publicly shaming him? Could you? With deplatforming he is told that what he is talking about is called ethnic cleansings and he is a horrible Nazi for even mentioning such a thing. So he gets banned and has to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem he witnessed. He finds one of the isolated fringe boards. They are the only place to talk about it. While granted there are alot of Nazis, who cares, you find morons everywhere and they get banned on the platform as well, so he is obviously not in a Nazi board himself. He talks a while and finds some people who agree with him, who tell him that the mixing of inherently different groups is the core issue. He saw it himself after all. You just have to look as far as the Identitarian movement who put a lot of effort into discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Believe me if i tell you, they do know how to debate with someone, you cant cling to the cliche of the drunk skinhead.
That is of course a rather unbelievable story, who witnesses one of those conflicts after all? They are often shitty holiday destinations. But how many have had negative personal encounters with people who fit the role of a migrant or Muslim? The story is the same everywhere with every topic, we dont live in a perfect world and the far right is readily available with easy convenient answer for perceived or real problems. Are you still able to convince someone in a discussion about refugees and womens rights? And with convince I dont mean explaining someone why it is wrong to say something. What deplatforming is is peer pressure. You dont convince anyone with that. You just convince them that you have no answers yourself and to keep their mouth shut till an opportune time arrives. Before the internet that meant never being able to talk with anyone about that in your village or town because the neighbors might find out, with the exception of maybe a more extreme pub round. Your only real option was to look for a straight up Nazi Kameradschaft in the wider vicinity. That was a big step to take. Today they can easily look for more "reasonable" people or even join a major party. Deplatforming at its core leads to people getting targeted for what they say. The people get combated, the ideology behind it stays untouched. If we want any hope for the future that doesnt include a civil war or living in a fascist dictatorship we should look hard at switching that. Combating the ideology and convincing the people. Granted those debates are difficult and furthermore, a horrible past time. Most people dont want to talk about such atrocious things and dont want those discussion to happen in their living room. Just not having these discussions and excluding people who want to talk about it is much easier. Especially if you can feel good about yourself by going the easy way. The person vanishes from your view and becomes someone elses problem. Until they are all our problem.
You have a hypothesis, that deplatforming stops the spread of far right ideology. Thats a hypothesis we can easily test, we dont have to rely on your gut feeling how your policies affected the rest of the world around you. I think we can agree that we are just witnessing for the past few years an extreme rise of the far right across the globe. We are faced with openly far right parties which have made unbelievable rises in parliament and are in quite a few places on the way to becoming the strongest party and with that, will someday likely be the government. They already are the government in some places. Openly authoritarian politicians get elected and unthinkable thinks are happening like separating children of migrants from their parents and putting them in prison camps. And children dying due to lack of care in those facilities. I am sorry if i have to burst your bubble, but the current situation is a fucking emergency, the house is on fire and what we are currently doing is clearly not working. That leaves us with the question why deplatforming, exclusion and public shaming currently doesnt work? There are basically a few options as i see it (shamelessly stolen from a infamous German blog for people who are bored at work).
1) The strategy is valid and would work if it wasnt for those traitors in our midst who dont go along.
2) The strategy is valid and would work we just have to convince more people to join in.
3) The strategy is fundamentally broken and does not work.
4) The strategy is working, we just have to wait to see results.
If you see more options, please do share. I mean it. The situation is to damn severe for 4) we cant go on pretending like everything is fine and the situation being no different from combating the emergence of a Nazi youth club in small towns in the 80s or moderating a voluntary association in form of a board. If you have hopes for 1 or 2 i have to disappoint you. As an anti authoritarian myself let me tell you I sure as hell wont rally behind censorship. There is no authoritarian solution to the problems we face. While my view of the state of the world is granted horrible, I am sure i am not the only one who thinks this way. While the divide in the left between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians was not really a topic for the generation after the fall of the Soviet Union it is very real.
So you are mistaking my facts for a hypothesis, it is not. I’m a moderator on an active forum and have been for a while. This is what happens in reality.
Your hypothesis On the other hand is worth following if you have substantiating facts that back it up.
You are describing facts related to maintaining a walled-garden specialist community. And there are no particular consequences for anyone who is excluded from it. This is very different from real-world polities where excluding someone doesn't mean that they go away and get silenced.
Basically; your experience is interesting but it isn't clear it applies here. Moderating a forum is not the same as maintaining real social cohesion when people genuinely disagree with each other.
Lets not sugarcoat it, its an echo chamber where you and your peer group are in power to say what goes and what doesnt. You arent testing anything but getting slowly used to a position of power. Which seems have given you the wrong idea about just being able to tell people how we should do things. I am sorry to burst your bubble but moderating a discussion forum is not that big of life lesson as you make it out to be. I have been there. Our state is not a federation of forums, please take a step back and take a good look at society at large instead of your tidy echo chamber.
edit: Since we came to recommendations, I would suggest you actually talk to some Nazis to see what they are all about. Not some troll on a board but people who show up to a rally of a far right party. Ask their voterbase why they are there.
While roenxi explained it already, let me add to that. A forum is a voluntary association where you can easily exclude people. Its the equivalent of your living room. Keeping your livingroom or your peer group free of Nazis isnt difficult, you just tell them to leave. Children in kindergarden manage to do that, "you are stupid go away". A state is not a voluntary association. We are all stuck with each other and somehow need to get along. There is no real "ban" option. If you are talking about anything remotely comparable in real life you are talking about a military struggle. I dont think we really need to have the discussion why this is a bad idea?
>It’s easier to make vague funny one liners which reach the top of the page, drowning out that 8 page report on the telecom industry.
>Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.
I see this all the time on Reddit in subs like /r/politics and /r/news, sarcastic quips get thousands of upvotes and dominate the discussion with no room for any dissenting opinions. Makes it real hard to find out who's being genuine in their approach and who's towing the party line for upvotes. Reddit isn't great for discussion though.
I suppose my question is, what stops your forum from becoming an echo chamber? Are "vague funny one liners" and "Bashing a political candidate" considered bad speech even if they're not leading to crazier philosophies? Would the hundreds of one liners about Trump in /r/politics be considered bad speech? Where can I find genuine discourse?
> The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.
> Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.
How do you reconcile these two? Because it seems like the first defeats the second.
> You know what works? De-platforming them. Not giving them a voice in the public discourse
Many people (me included) find this approach very unpalatable because of how inherently authoritarian it is. (Ironically, this suggestion often comes from the same people who are concerned by how underrepresented some groups are in the public discourse and how the voices of those groups are not heard, and want to artificially amplify those voices). If you have studied history of any repressive regime where dissenters were deprived of any conventional platform and were reduced to circulating their ideas in the underground, you might empathise.
It's absolutely fine not to take certain groups seriously. But it feels (to me) deeply unfair to undermine their very ability to speak.
Of course not; but "inviting to every X", or "giving the same space" is very different from disallowing X to share the same space (especially if said client change deniers or communists are prepared to have a conversation using roughly the same epistemological tools as actual scientists). There is no onus on platform providers to ensure that every opinion gets the same attention as others; my argument is that they merely let others be.
That's been proven? Where? Because at least anecdotally, I recall reading so many stories of people who were talked out of a cult by having better information presented to them.
I think if you're pushing back on the GP to ask for evidence, it is intellectually dishonest to go ahead and make your own un-founded statements. Can _you_ link to some of these stories to reinforce your point?
As far as challenges of the put your money where your mouth is kind, this one was pretty easy. So easy in fact, that you should take a moment to reflect on why you were so quick to get on a moral high-horse of burden of proof.
It was a reasonable request. You appear to be upset about being asked for supporting links, despite having made the same request yourself. I genuinely don't understand that. I'm concerned that we're drifting too far away from the orignal topic though, so there may be limited scope to explore this aspect of things here.
A: Claim X.
B: Can you support X? Claim not X.
C: Can you support not X. You should provide support for not X before asking for support of X.
Is it really reasonable to call out B for not providing support and not call out A for the same? B was the first to ask for sources, but A made the claim without sources. It also seems like if B only made the claim not X and didn't ask for sources, they would have been less likely to be called out themself.
So is asking people who ask for sources to provide sources really reasonable when we don't make the same request of people who are making claims without any sources? It seems to give a first move advantage and thus wouldn't be reasonable.
Sorry, I've only just seen this. Your breakdown doesn't reflect what happened here. You would be correct if all B had said was "Support X".
What we saw above was:
A: Claim X
B: Support X, I've observed Y.
C: Support Y too, please.
In this particular case, Y was arguably the inverse of X but it was nevertheless described as having been observed many times, but without any sources.
You just provided anecdotes, so stop attacking the other person and consider that he is right.
You would have to prove effectiveness. i.e. out of 100 anti-vaxers, 90% stopped believing in bullshit. If it works on 1 person out of a million, that's pretty useless.
I was the first to point out that all I have are anecdotes. I did so under the perspective that I am sceptical of their claim.
I do not have to prove anything. As I have already said, the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, i.e., not me.
Even as a child in primary school, I learned in science class that theories are rarely proven, because it is so easy to disprove a supposedly proven theory by providing counter-evidence.
This is all somewhat tautological anyway. If you don't believe that people ever change their mind when presented with better information, then why are you even bothering to comment? Isn't it futile?
> You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them.
This isn't necessarily true. I was listening to a podcast about conspiracy theories and how misinformation spreads (the name of which is failing me right now), and in one episode there were some scientists who were dealing with a particular subsegment of the conspiracy theory crowd who would make wild claims about their scientific field. Trying to blackball them or shut down their voice was often all that was required to add fuel to their fire because "obviously these scientists were trying to suppress them because they didn't want the truth getting out".
What ended up being much more effective was inviting some of the conspiracy theorists to speak at one of their scientific conferences. It ended up completely taking the air out of their claims, because none of them were willing to get up and try and defend their ludicrous theories against a bunch of trained experts.
Short of creating an iron grip on all interaction with information a la China, deplatforming people is temporary, as creating and finding a new platform is easy and simply leads to a more concentrated echo chamber for their ideology to fester in. Voat, Gab, Hatreon, 4chan, 8chan, etc. There will always be another platform that opens up in response to other platforms shutting them down. And soon instead of having the original fake news or hateful ideology in the public, you now have a distilled, more extreme version of it leaking into the public.
I don't know what the perfect solution is, but simply deplatforming people isn't going to be it. It will likely be something more like drowning out conspiratorial ideas with high volumes of truthful ones, rather than simply trying to cutoff the oxygen of the conspiracy theorists.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Doing that destroys the intellectual curiosity the site exists for, so we ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
A bit too dramatic. Most places have libel laws, denmark is no exception. Twitter is not a newspaper but a platform. Most news are commentary on tweets anyway. After banning political paid ads (the burden of truth of which falls on twitter, since they are the ones doing the publishing), twitter is even less a publisher and more a platform.
Denmark? You mean one of the least feminist countries in the developed world? Not to mention the openly racist narrative about immigrants in public media. Compared to other Scandinavian countries the Danish media is extremely toxic so not sure about portraiting it as a role model in "well informed and critical thinking".
"just one in six Danes consider themselves a feminist"
"The Best Countries for Women is a perception-based ranking based on the responses of nearly 9,000 women who filled out surveys for the 2019 Best Countries rankings. The ranking is derived from a compilation of five equally weighted country attributes: care about human rights, gender equality, income equality, progress and safety."
Combined they make the statement that you can label yourself as non-feminist and still care about human rights, gender equality, income equality, progress and safety.
Here you have a perfect example of how truth is socially constructed. Keep discussing and hopefully some consensual truth will emerge... Maybe... And not for long...
That's the thing. Danish media hates political correctness, for good and evil. It doesn't hesitate to publish numbers that indirectly fuel undemocratic narratives, even if they are true. I personally think we should be PC in those cases and think about what effects it will have on society.
"It doesn't hesitate to publish numbers that indirectly fuel undemocratic narratives, even if they are true. I personally think we should be PC in those cases and think about what effects it will have on society."
From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of:
If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down?
I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust. As a result, no matter how easy or difficult truth is to find, without trust no one will believe the truth even if they hear it clearly.
I find political speech pervasive, and believe that almost everything a person says or does has some political element. Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.
> I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech.
I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify.
First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don't mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult.
Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in the press? Do we need to go lookup in Lexis-Nexis every statement the candidate has made about the Green New Deal?
Even if we limit it to actual votes, it's still problematic. Did the candidate vote for the markup in committee? Did they vote to move it to the floor? In the Senate, did they vote for cloture, but vote against it on the floor? Did they vote for the bill out of conference?
Some might recall, we spent a good portion of the 2004 campaign arguing over whether John Kerry voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.
This stuff is extremely subjective. It's probably something like a day's work for a seasoned reporter to accurately fact check a claim like this, and even then it's open to interpretation, which is easy enough to express in a fact check, but pretty hard in a binary judgement of truth.
I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.
Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
There is a danger in deferring a "truth" assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Careful, getting a bit too postmodernists in here. If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.
>And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
And how many politicians on both sides of the aisle double-down on an issue just to remain consistent to their base?
Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbying or the promise of a high-up position once they're out of office?
>And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Maybe the Stoics were on to something. If the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth?
> If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.
Isn't the point of seeing the truth as non-binary that they cannot become false? Just less likely to be true?
This seems intrinsically more amenable to changing one's mind on the truth of something, though I agree that not having an opinion on the truth of something is apathetic. Just because you strongly believe that you're about 60% sure that something is true doesn't make it less strongly held.
I do this all the time in scientific analysis... estimating how likely I am to be correct is part of the job.
I think what they mean by truths becoming false is rather that all certainties become uncertainties. Delving too deep in postmodernism is like taking all of your legos and melting them.
If I want to have a conversation about free speech, and a postmodernist begins questioning if we even actually have free will, or if it's even valid to discuss morality if it's entirely possible we exist in a simulation...you haven't actually advanced anything. You've just made soup. Postmodernism is a tool for turning building blocks into soup, and that is more often than not extremely counterproductive. Though it is, to some degree, necessary.
I think the fundamental problem is that aggressive postmodernism will often disregard presuppositions with absolutely no interest in understanding the utility/value of the presupposition.
"If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually"
My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.
"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."
Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.
"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"
I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.
I think postmodernism leads straight to linguistics, not apathy. Much of politics is based around words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “the middle class”, “big government”. There is no truth around these things because they mean whatever is politically convenient in the moment. I mean sure you can define a pretty good general purpose term for your own use, but that’s not going to be how politicians use it. These should be seen as rhetorical terms, not inherently meaningful outside of the context of, say, a speech or and ongoing public discussion. It is far easier and cheaper to redefine yourself out of commitments than it is to actually stand for concrete values. The fix is to stand for concrete values that everyone can easily identify and discuss in concrete terms. It should be easy, then, to determine the difference between “waffling” and adjusting to a new situation because everyone can adjust together around a value consensus.
Note, PR takes literally the exact opposite tact to communication. We’re barreling deep into a post-truth world with an incredible amount of money fueling this. See also: non linear warfare, hypernormalization, Edward Bernays, why to buy a newspaper when it never makes money.
> And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative
Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.
Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?
If the Christians are bullying the athiests, and the agnostic does nothing, then yes, they are implicitly supporting the actions taking place in their vicinity. If they're just all sitting around doing nothing, the implicit support is of them sitting around doing nothing.
Yes, people are fine with all sorts of murders and other atrocities taking place, as long as its not happening to them. As long as the right kind of people suffer. Your phrasing is wrong, of course, because you're conflating support for something with committing the act yourself, but you're not too far off the mark.
- one: you are bringing religion into a discussion where it isn't necessary
- two: it hangs in a frame where a causual passer-by might think this is usual. I mean: if I write "if the rabbits chases the cats and the dogs do nothing" an hypothetical reader who knows nothing about cats and rabbits might easily get the idea that this is a common occurrence, while in fact it is fact a very unusual one.
- one: not my example; it was introduced by someone as a rhetorical jab by trying to introduce an emotionally-charged subject. The point doesn't depend on religion in any particular way, and I'm happy to rephrase it.
- two: I think this is fine. In an example where a bunch of people are sitting in a bar and a big group starts bullying a smaller group, someone who does nothing is allowing this to happen, and we can attribute moral responsibility for them allowing this to happen. Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay. If someone doesn't know or understand that bullying is wrong, assigning moral responsibility is more complicated, but neither of those things depend on their knowledge of the frequency of bullying. There is a way in which available information is important, but not this one.
Writing - especially in an Internet forum context - about Christians bullying Atheists
is about as fitting as
- in a historic context - writing an example about Jews killing Nazis. Yes, it has happened, more than once. And no, for some reason that doesn't make it a good example except when we are discussing that particular topic.
Besides, as was mentioned above you are both pulling an unrelated group of people into this and you are pulling religion into an argument about something else.
Snide remarks like that is equally annoying regardless of if they come from you or from the old relative who always wants to frame everything good that happens as a miracle from $DEITY
Both you and the old relative might mean it well and get som points from people who agree with you but on the larger scale it only increases tension.
I rephrased in terms of unnamed groups, what are you still going on about? You should direct these comments at the person who chose to make it about religion.
(Hey philipov, I'm kinda using this comment to reply to both of you -- not everything here is directed at you.)
Guy Who Chose To Make It About Religion, over here! FWIW I was just looking for a concrete example that would illustrate the preposterous nature of the statement I was replying to, and when I searched my brain for people who don't have a position on something "agnostic" was the one that immediately came to mind. Having the hindsight of seeing this little back and forth between you two, maybe "undecided voter" would have been more apropos... but I feel like that could have potentially spiraled out, too. In any event, I wasn't trying to start a holy flame war and I didn't imagine that anybody would go on a tangent about the religious aspect of it.
That said, why not stoke these flames unnecessarily? As for whether athiests gang up on Christians more than the other way around, I don't think the "internet" context is relevant; the internet is the context we're discussing this in, but the hypothetical bar was IRL (or at least, that was the interpretation of the author and the author has never heard of a bar that isn't IRL). Where I live (Midwest US) Christians ganging up on athiests seems more common than the other way around IRL, so if we need to unpack the realism of philipov's modification to my example and willfully ignore the fact that their choice of which group would be cast as the aggressor was just based on which group was initially larger in my example (which was in turn based on which group is larger IRL, but I don't feel the example would be substantially different if labels were reversed) I'll vote for "marginally more realistic than the other way around and nowhere near the same ballpark as a roles-reversed holocaust."
Good explanation. My original point was that the attempt to reduce to absurdity fails because it's not simply being something or holding some opinion that causes others to be in implicit support of it. Implicit support consists in being present when an immoral or unethical action takes place, and not stopping it when you have the opportunity to do so. Indeed, it doesn't even require one group to be in the majority, although fear of going against a larger group is often what causes people to stay silent.
I get your point, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to my original post because the comment I was replying to was making statements about the truth of descriptive claims rather than, say, standing by while group X oppresses group Y. Of course these are intertwined and hard to separate in some cases; you can find plenty of examples where descriptive claims have been used to justify horrible atrocities, and being agnostic towards the claims Nazis made about Jews would not garner my sympathies, but I hope you can understand the distinction I'm drawing. I don't even feel comfortable saying that the scared or indifferent onlooker would be supporting group X (though if they pay taxes to group X I'd say they are supporting the oppression whether or not they speak up, in a financial sense), but I do understand your reasoning in that context and don't particularly care to split hairs over the definition of "support" (it doesn't affect my opinions of standing by and doing nothing in the face of oppression, I'm just a pedantic motherfucker).
Did the Christians try to convince the agnostic about something? If not, nothing changes before or after they leave.
Anyway, the OP was about political ads that can affect how people vote, a decision to vote or not affects the community. Being agnostic about something (aliens) does not necessarily have the same gravity of effect as believing in a political ad.
The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.
In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.
We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.
I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.
> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.
No, there are formal systems for handling uncertainty, Bayesian inference, fuzzy logic etc. Even informally we do apply similar rules all the time (though we are not free of biases)
Degrees of truth aren't some option you can choose, it's just an observation about how the world already works, where information is universally not perfect. The point is by acknowledging it, you will be more willing to update bad information and bad conclusions as you get updated information.
“X supports the Green New Deal” is indeed highly subjective for some values of X. But that doesn’t include most Republicans, who have been consistently against the whole thing from start to finish.
I think the parent's point is that the variable is for some values of "Green New Deal".
It's like how Republicans (tend to) oppose "socialized health care" but support Medicare. A lot of politics is just playing with words, and "Green New Deal" offers plenty of ambiguity.
For example, say that the Green New Deal is a specific bill in a House committee. For some political reason (maybe the Democrats aren’t ready to vote on it yet), the Republican chair of the committee, Representative X, votes in favor of it. Thus an ad saying “Representative X voted in favor of the Green New Deal” is factually accurate while an ad saying “Representative X supports the Green New Deal” is debatably true.
Okay, you can point out one extreme side of the continuum. What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?
> I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust.
This is true, of course, but why is this such a serious or novel concern? All criminal trials, for instance, require making a judgement on the truth about reality. Of course some cases are very hard, and sometimes we get the wrong outcome. But what else do you suggest? That no one ever attempt to determine anything about reality?
> What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn't do that cannot possibly get elected?
Basically an arms race of lies, where those willing to lie the most have the greatest advantage. What's worse is that the most insidious of the lies will appeal to the parts of the targets' psyches that wants very much to believe the lies, and therefore unlikely to proactively fact check (i.e Pizzagate).
And as has been the trend of late, lies that are eventually publicly debunked will be minimized as being "just jokes".
The cream should eventually rise to the top. Political ads are now archived for anyone to scrutinize. If a politician kept releasing ridiculous ads, voters and the general public would likely know about the existence at least. Censoring ads opens up a much larger can of worms IMO. "Republicans back the green deal" could mean:
a. Congressional Republican majority
b. Some elected Republicans
c. A group of Republican voters
If AOC ran that ad, it very well would be truthful for B and C, but should Facebook interpret the ad as describing A? There's way too much nuance to be the single arbitrator.
You mention that political ads are archived for anyone to scrutinize. I am not aware of this and my belief is that this is both not the case, and in fact very difficult to execute due to the ephemeral nature of internet advertising.
For example, imagine my TIMECUBE PAC ponies up for 2500 targeted facebook micro-campaigns with very slight variations depending on the target demo with an ad spend of $20, $50K cost. Would it be actually possible for anybody to get Facebook to tell them who I was advertising at, or what those ads were?
Well thats certainly something to dig into. Thank you.
However, this search box doesn't adequately explain who is seeing these ads. It does expose which state the ads are shown within, and the general demo (age, gender), but if I am not mistaken the ad targeting service is way more fine grained than this. Isn't this stuff down to the zip+4 or even, "near a Starbucks"? Facebook faced a lawsuit[0] in 2019 for Fair Housing Act violations, the complaint alleges that facebook let people advertise housing while excluding "Hispanic", "New Parents", etc in the target demographics.
It also looks like I can search back 7, 60, 30, 90 days or "All Impressions". There's no way a librarian had any input in this.
In addition, I suspect that if I were to actually do analysis here Facebook would start demanding PII, especially if I start crawling the searches. Is there an API for this? The infinite scrolling is IMO useless for any real use cases such as monitoring political ads in general.
It does appears as if I could use this search box to find one ad campaign or all of one org's campaigns. But I kind of suspect I'd need a whole bunch of grad students to do data collection?
Do you know if other platforms also expose some political ads?
Yes, exactly. This is at least granular enough to see location, gender, type of message, etc. previously with TV or old media, we couldn’t access who politicians were targeting with ads. Now we can. I don’t see how this isn’t an improvement?
TV ads are broadcast and you can have one grad student check some boxes per market, they just need an extension cord and a bunch of TVs to watch.
Internet ads can have a spend of one and they're gone, or behind this really slick infinite scroll. If 40 people see the ad really whats the likelihood of gleaning useful information?
The Old World Mad Men style Ad is blasted from the antenna, printed, or plastered on a billboard. With Old Media you can tell easily who's being targeted because you can't narrow down based on "Likely to be Pregnant". A TV commercial is incapable of pranking your roommate[0], this stuff is a wholly new category, and its profitability is larger than Uber's 2019 Q2 posted losses.
While this handy search page is for sure an improvement over Facebook's previously completely opaque ad market, I disagree that this is an improvement over the Old Media.
I'd also imagine the Old Media ads have a lawyer or compliance person overseeing the business, and while I know FB has the lawyers I doubt anyone is motivated or empowered to hit the brakes.
You can still target ads based on the type of show, time of day, and billboard location. I still don't believe you could have grad students look at every political ad, especially across all local elections. While the content of the ad does not change much for TV, you still won't know exactly how much a politician was paying for each ad slot, and what demographic the politician was trying to target.
Yes indeed, this is all true except the last phrase. You can quickly infer which demo the ad was made for my observing the location, time, or tv show.
Just look at the content surrounding the ads on daytime soaps, college ball, anime cartoons. Billboard next to (My apologies for this shorthand, I can't think of any polite way to make this next analogy) "Inner City" liquor store, suburban daycare, or just along the interstate.
As well as dead reckoning, I'll bet a local library has the spend on paper in some industry publication. Anyone in the industry can probably rattle off the spend and get pretty close. Plus, since they are marketing ad space for money, why not send over a proposal and see what the initial offer is?
Surely this takes more time than glancing at some Facebook reactjs ad timeline which is for sure not edited by an algorithm, but like I said there is a finite amount of billboards and tv channels. One grad student wouldn't do it, but however many you need for the internet is sure going to cost you.
Cable subs are going one direction, so it’s probably better to think about the other alternative mediums. These would be streaming services like Hulu, YouTube, Roku, digital billboards, and digital ad impressions through ad exchanges. All of these will offer significant ways to personalize and customize ads for viewers and have no audit system presently. I don’t see how Facebook removing political advertising remotely solves the problem going forward.
I completely agree with what you're saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."
Starting somewhere bad without a plan is actively bad.
Here's the thing, people. FB and Twitter are pretty much garbage. That's fine, and we all mostly agree about that.
Here's the worst part of social media in general: it's uniting the absolute shittiest of the Republicans with the absolute shittiest of the Democrats and encouraging them both to get together and form a government agency that defines "truth" and then forces private entities to enforce that truth.
There is literally nothing Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website could do that would be this actually bad.
It's real hard to find a reason to be upset with a blanket ban on political ads on Twitter. You can still say what you want to say, but Twitter isn't going to accept money to help you promote your message. Good for them.
While I agree with you, the most vocal of Twitter users likely won’t. Some will be furious if NRA ads are allowed, and others furious if ACLU ads are allowed. And for some reason those are the people society has decided to listen to.
A sympathetic news outlet is often treading on the edge of political advertising as well. Some TV station airing a favorable or unfavorable documentary on a candidate during election season when executives of those stations have publicly supported (or not supported) a candidate or party seems no different than a PAC buying an ad on that same station.
Imagine if we applied this standard to a story of significant presidential malfeasance in October. Something so terrible no one would ever vote for the person. Should we?
Independent political action committees (both PACs and Super PACs) need to report their spending to the FEC, tied to the candidate their independent expenditure is in favor of/support.
That covers most political spending on the national level. Political spending for state offices (which dont have to report to the FEC) is a whole other story.
The difficulty is that we once used propaganda in war time, because we needed it. The problem now is that you don’t know who is doing it, and for what.
And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.
nowadays most of us have no idea what is propaganda and what isn't. heck sometimes you eventually research it and realize stuff you believed was true for decades because you were just told so by some authoritative source (like "TV" or what not really), turn out, is between misleading to flat out wrong. Note that I'm not even thinking about this in terms of politics. It seems to be the case for so many different things, sometimes due to ignorance, sometimes malice.
What I saw was that AOC very effectively got him to admit that they already will do it in certain cases. He admitted that if someone tried to place an ad that contributed to voter suppression (by misreporting the date of the election), that would be banned.
One persons "suppression of speech" is another persons right to not publish and spread that persons bullshit.
This is why people always bring up that the "Free speech" is a concept that applies to governments(never-mind the historical origins in ancient Athens which was largely around protecting political discourse and dissent from prosecution..). Like many restrictions placed on the government it falls apart and becomes contradictory when applied to the individual.
If this is intended to make a §230 argument, consider that its reason d'etre is based on the complete impracticality of pre-clearing user generated content.
The practical considerations differ by orders of magnitude when we're talking about paid advertisements.
Although a popular meme like the platform/publisher duality it isn't a valid concept legally - at least in the US conception. Not any more than being able to get away with specific death threats as "a promise". That sort of "marginal loophole" is frowned upon in the jurisprudence period. The prevailing form of restrictions that have survived are specific and tailored invalidations of forms of speech protection - threats, fraud, and libel.
Not to say that special pleading for abridging rights hasn't embedded itself via ex-nilho doctrines turned precedent.
Many trees constitute a forest. A single tree does not. At some point, a group of trees becomes large enough to be considered a forest. There is no way to provide any non-arbitrary rule where that point is.
Does this render the concept of a "forest" meaningless?
This exact topic is covered in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and the answer is that the concept of forest is not defined by such a condition. It is a basket of examples of forests and identifying a new example in the basket is done by means of analogy to the existing examples.
It is therefore possible for a concept to grow to include contradictory examples, at which point people will typically split the basket into two distinct concepts, like a forest vs a grove. The point at which that happens is somewhat arbitrary, but it also doesn't exist a priori. Someone has to try to use the word ambiguously. Words don't have meanings until they are used by people to mean.
It is even possible for a distinction to not be made, and for someone to experience cognitive dissonance when two contradictory examples remain in the same basket.
I run a site. I want to get rid of all fraudulent spam but allow legitimate commercial product advertisements. I train a model to tell the difference (or maybe I just make a human judgment call). It is better than guessing but worse than perfect: false positives and false negatives exist and expose me to criticism from interested parties.
Your position is that this renders the concept of spam meaningless because I promised to get rid of spam and allow non-spam content.
If you're tying ribbons to trees in forests but not to other trees, you (or other interested folks) can correct any errors. And, if you actually wanted to be fair, you'd fix your mistakes yourself (or with your own resources) instead of expecting everyone else to clean up after you.
If you have robots chopping down forests, there's not much to do when they're wrong except apologize and explain that algorithms are hard.
All advertising is incredibly political, because companies operate in a politicized world.
Under this guidance for example, Shell could advertise all they want on twitter, but running an ad against Shell about how they pollute the environment or contribute to global warming would be banned.
So then your options are to ban all advertising, or be selective in what advertising you allow. Which is inherently a political position.
I don't disagree. I absolutely think Twitter should draw lines. It's just intellectually dishonest to try and get around it by banning all political advertising, but it's obvious because Twitter doesn't want to take a stance on anything. So they want to act like they effectively take a stance on nothing.
Twitter isn't drawing a line in the sand as much as they are deciding to ban the whole beach and kick everyone off it.
At least then Twitter would have a pretty clear incentive to combat your bot as it and its ilk could have a substantial effect on their revenue. No doubt this will happen. You could already be doing this on youtube to flag a competitor's content as copyright infringement.
Well, Google has figured out how to make it really hard to make a link farm that gets your web page to the top of the listings.
Very similar problem. I would expect that they would keep track of who is doing the flagging and whether their flagging is consistent with other flaggers, and various other tests for "naturalness" and lack of bias and so on. Then weight things appropriately.
She also asked if it’d be OK to advertise the wrong date for Election Day in a predominantly black zip code for example which I can totally see as a possibility.
No need to even think of controlling speech. But certainly ban political advertising which amounts to bribery both in theory and practice.
No one could genuinely believe that probating de-facto bribery is indistinguishable from censorship. Indeed it's very telling that banning _all_ political ads is objected to as being allegedly "biased".
> Indeed it's very telling that banning _all_ political ads is objected to as being allegedly "biased"
Easy solution that should make everyone happy: a complete ban on all forms of advertising, on all platforms, in all mediums, without any carve outs for any group, cause, or creed.
Or we can just continue to let some people mind-hack the public so that other people can get rich.
The issue is who gets to be the arbiter of what counts as "political propaganda and deliberate lies"?
The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all.
I tend to think that if this is true for government, it's probably true for large corporations as well.
I think the issue is whether it still qualifies as free speech when it's paid advertisement. Inevitably the companies with the largest coffers and most to gain get a megaphone and you end up with tiers of free speech (pay to be heard).
What do you think of a world where Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan get to decide what is and isn’t “political propaganda and deliberate lies”? Because until very recently, they were “the government.”
> Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.
And, choosing not to determine the peripherey of political speech, is also political. Inaction is a choice, which by its nature supports the status quo.
I am not saying inaction, or the status quo, is necessarily good or bad, although I don't agree with the implication in the parent post that Facebook shouldn't do something.
What should be done is delicate and will always require constant negotiation, and be in flux. I am a proponent of free speech. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, is, of course, a classic example of a "surpression" of speech, and, the history of the US court system in ruling that books which were banned are legal to publish, etc, is a good example that our legal system has tools to negotiate these issues and can do so.
For the record, the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" example came from one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, which sent a man to jail for distributing anti-draft literature during WWI. The parent comment isn't necessarily guilty of this, but I've noticed that the people who approvingly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes as a justification for restrictions on free speech almost invariably have no clue about the historical context.
If I could give all the upvotes I ever had, I would assign them to this post right here. It truly saddens me that this one comment represents the exception to this entire thread rather than the majority. Doesn’t it occur to anyone that Twitter is just like any other big corporation out there and this “principled stand” is nothing more than a corporatist trampling of our basic rights? Twitter ceased to be useful to me years ago but this latest action just affirms to me that they really have no clue what freedom is.
That's what confuses me, a bit. Consider just as a hypothetical that Facebook is the single most unethical company on earth. Just as an example, whether you agree with it or not. I still wouldn't necessarily agree with what's being asked of them, to actively disallow political ads with lies. I think there's a good case to be made for just not having political ads (because of all the reasons you'd expect)... but I can understand having them, too, and it's a bit weird to me as someone who doesn't like a lot of what FB does to see the politicians die on the hill of "you must fact check everything"
It’s not weird at all, it’s a power grab. The politicians want to use social media as an excuse to become arbiters of the truth.
It’s repulsive and short-sighted, it appears to me they have forgotten or disregarded the old adage to not claim a new power you wouldn’t trust your opponents with.
“The truth” as applied to the realm of politics is very often something of substantial controversy and disagreement.
Asking a corporation to be in charge of arbitrating those disagreements doesn’t seem like the end game these politicians are actually pursuing here. Instead my interpretation of their motivation is to silence their opposition.
They are trying to setup a system where they are gatekeepers of these political disagreements, ignoring the fact that the same system will almost certainly be weaponized against them.
For what it’s worth I’m on the same “side” as these politicians for many issues, I just feel like they are playing a dangerous game here.
For nearly a decade, Donald Trump said Obama was not born in America, despite that being objectively false. Is that a position that shouldn't be silenced? What value does that objectively false assertion add to society? In 2016, pro-Trump ads targeted black voters with ads indicating the wrong day to go vote, with the goal of suppressing the black vote. What value did those objectively false assertions add to society. Why shouldn't they be silenced?
I can't understand how anyone thinks this is a reasonable argument after even ten seconds of thought, and yet it shows up reliably in every conversation on this topic.
We're talking about setting rules that span literally _billions_ of conversations. Taking fully for granted the notion that there are facts that are objective, 100% knowable facts: The question isn't about how the system handles obviously false or obviously true statements, it's how it handles everything on the margin. There were tons of things that were considered conspiracy theories that we now consider clear fact: people like you would have been the ones saying "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the CIA is drugging and torturing and raping children"[1] in America in the 1950s, or "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the government is euthanizing the disabled"[2] in 1930s Germany or any number of "obviously false" things that were very much true.
I have no reason to believe your particular example falls into that category, but the sweeping claim that arbitrating political facts is trivial is profoundly ignorant of even a tiny bit of history.
There are literally billions of ways that a factory could poison the drinking water with toxic byproducts from their production process. Obviously a community will be significantly harmed if their drinking water is poisoned, but the community also benefits from the profits generated by the factory, so regulators set thresholds that limit harm to the community while facilitating commerce. If the product is too toxic to meet those thresholds, then the factory should stop production and find less harmful ways to make a profit.
Facebook is arguing for the right to poison the well with a literally unlimited volume of toxic disinformation, rather than figure out a way to reduce if not eliminate that harm. Perhaps they limit the number of political ads that any single account can view to some small number. Perhaps they can only fact-check ads on topics that reach a certain view-count level. Or if it's too difficult of an engineering problem for Facebook to not poison the well, then they can stop hosting political ads.
Facebook is already arbitrating the truth. If you share a link or post an ad, it can be automatically annotated by an "independent third party fact checker", which they have a few of. But if it's an ad that is specifically from a political candidate, there is no fact checking done. Of course, these ads are mixed into your news feed with just a small "Sponsored" note.
If Facebook had not started its fact checking system nobody would be asking it to fact check political ads now.
This point of view is kinda incoherent. These platforms are not open. They're owned. And the owners can decide what you can and cannot say on it. In the end, if they think that some kinds of expression are not good for them, they not only have the right, but from a corporate perspective, a responsibility to their enterprise to end that expression on their platform.
Pressure from lawmakers and the public alike can change their policies. And we can always vote with our feet.
There's a difference between opinion and facts/lies. Opinion is fine, but when someone is spreading an objective lie (the earth is flat!)... that's where it seems like this is a cop out for Facebook to pretend they can't get involved due to "free speech". Sure, let people share opinions, but not lies and misinformation.
would already greatly diminish the effect. Two hops away is a magnitude or two less of exposure.
When Spain changed organ donations from opt-in to opt-out the rate increased from 30% to 9x%. That's one tick of a box.
I see these comments a lot and I don't know if people purposefully try to downplay the role of smart design because they pursue an agenda or if people seriously don't recognise how significant small changes in design can be.
If we'd manage to hide false information behind two clicks we'd have done the world a great service.
I agree. In terms of twitter's decision though.... This could either support their decision or the opposite.
Being the arbitar of truth is both an unavoidable demand and an impossible task for Twitter. Being a "public square" where politics is decided/discussed makes the implications of this problem especially acute. Fairness, whatever that means, is doubly important in democratic media.
Their detractors (and would-be regulators) will ultimately demand a "corporate policy" and judge them by their inconsistency... Why is this banned and not that? That is, a set of rules applied in all circumstances. Clear legible rules applied consistently is where cracks in theories like "truth and lies are easily discernable" inevitably appear.
It's an impossibly hard line to police. "This is a political ad," OTOH, is an easier judgement to make. Contraversial decisions would be tolerable too, deeming one and political but not another. East is probably an overstatement, but political/not-political is easier than truth/lies
There will never be a successful community without some level of moderation. It is better for us to define the levels of moderation than have a organization start adjudicating truth.
That depends on what we mean by "successful." The early chans were very moderation free -- 4chan initially didn't censor, then they started censoring furry content but not pedo content, then the furry ban got removed, then the pedo ban finally kicked in, and they've had more censorship since... but the initial seed was practically not moderated, and most of the moderation that has been put in place since seems like a result of legal fears (the brief furry ban being an obvious exception). The bitmessage chans are still moderation free, and will be as long as the bitmessage network has nodes, but of course that can't scale (for anyone unfamiliar, every bitmessage node tries to decrypt every message -- this means that there is no need for metadata concerning where a message was sent to, and since packets are forwarded across the network you'd have to be running multiple nodes to even guess where a message is coming from, but there's no way that everybody could recieve and try to decrypt everybody else's messages if the whole world used such a system). I'm not arguing that I want a system without moderation, just that such communities have existed, have grown, and do exist. My ideal would be a community with opt-in/opt-out moderation, but I also don't wish every community to reflect my ideals.
Deciphering truth is up to the individual. You don't get to declare yourself the authority thereon, empowered to control what others hear based on what you deem "truth".
Strange how many purporting to wave the banner of "equality and diversity" want absolute control over others, rather than respect the natural sovereignty of the individual.
I am sorry but when has money not meaning more speech ever been true in practice? Even in Communist Dictatorships
it didn't hold as those with power also had money effectively.
Printing presses and distribution were expensive - even more so back in the day and before their invention it held - arguably even more so.
It may be a good ideal for having ideas standing on their own weight but a precedent it is not.
I’d take it a step further and limit who is allowed to vote. You mention competent adults; an adult in 1800 was probably competent around 16 years of age. An adult today is similarly competent at a later age.
Regardless of competency, there should be some eligibility requirements to vote. Holding a job should be one. Proof of citizenship should be another.
I very rarely downvote comments here as a matter of principle but yours here is almost comically absurd.
1. Do you have any evidence that people were more competent at a younger age in 1800? In fact I would think that the opposite is probably true - but again this seems impossible to prove so I'm simply asking you if you have any reason to believe what you're saying is true other than your feelings.
2. People without jobs have just as many rights as those with jobs. Do you also think people without land should not vote? Perhaps not women? Maybe black votes should have less of an impact? I'm curious if you're not American- maybe this would explain a cultural difference I am missing?
Obviously such questions were manipulative grandstanding. The only way to win the political rhetoric game is not to play. That's what twitter is doing.
I generally comprehend "grandstanding" in the common language to not only be seeking attention but to misrepresent false or unimportant information for the sake of gaining that attention. Does my definition mesh with yours or how would you find that quote to be misrepresenting a problem in society?
While her question could seem to be reductive, I think it's accurately reducing the question to a point where the answer is easily approachable to most people and, while often time the actual advertisements less obvious lies in practice, a lot of facebook advertisements are knowingly spreading falsehoods and that is hurting the political dialog.
oh her questions were more reasonable than others, like for example the question about the sexual orientations of Libra association member boards. Still, her question about what constitutes a political lie is not representative of 99% of political lies , which are usually more subtle and subject to debate. Also, his response "we should let the people see for themselves the lies and judge politicians accordingly" was not really countered at all.
That was probably the only point Zuckerberg made that I agree with, though I don’t doubt that we think that way for different reasons.
If I know social networks are deleting ads or posts that are deemed untruthful then 1) how do I see who determines the truthfulness of the network’s content and 2) how can I trust that nothing else is being removed at will? It’s a classic argument.
Personally, I trust myself to filter through information and make informed decisions; more so than Facebook or Twitter. I think that many people prefer not to make informed political decisions on their own for a variety of reasons. Be it a lack of time, ambition, or research knowledge, it harms us as a whole when we allow ourselves to be told what political opinions to hold.
What if the networks aren't deleting the content but just not distributing it to you? For example, Facebook determines what shows up on my newsfeed. If my friend posts something, and Facebook guesses that I won't be interested in it, it won't show on my newsfeed (I think) or it will be buried in the less important section. It may still exist on my friend's wall because he posted it, but I don't see it unless I actively go to his wall.
So even if the networks don't delete the content, they are already determining what we should and shouldnt see, no?
I’m not sure how much of the population would agree with me here, but I would prefer to be shown content organically. I’m talking posts sorted chronologically, not cherry picked for me, just the raw feed essentially.
Having an algorithm or AI determine what I will or won’t see on a social media page is marginally better than a person deciding that no one should see that content. With that said, my bottom line here is that I would prefer that my internet experience go completely untampered with. I come online to discover new things that I wouldn’t see otherwise. Whether that’s a new hobby or a political falsehood, I want to discover and form an opinion on it myself.
after reading Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier I have come to realize that trust is a really difficult thing to implement online. Look at how hard it is for Amazon to police counterfeit items or fake reviews.
I agree with your general points, but I'll argue against their relative priority.
You're saying that all speech is somehow political. I agree. Yet you must admit that on an advertising platform, there are some forms of political speech (e.g., the type allowed by ad buys) that, in lieu of some external regulation, will be _inherently_ biased. That is, the economic arrangement can only pit one group against another.
The only _true_ solution to this problem is a platform where the stakeholders (users) also govern all parts of the platform like a common pooled resource. But we know this cannot happen because, well, capitalism.
So I do not discount your claim that all goings-on in public fora are inherently political, I'll just pit two concrete facts against your abstract observation: 1) limiting political ad buys will be less bad than not limiting political ad buys and 2 we can only start really reasoning about your abstract concept of relative existential truths after we fundamentally fix a fundamentally broken economic and technical arrangement.
One of the better questions she asked was, "should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?"
Zuck's response was, "well, I think it's BAD if you LIE. Telling lies is bad." but wouldn't say that Facebook would moderate that kind of content.
I personally don't see a legitimate free speech claim saying that political parties should be allowed to target opponents with plain, simple falsehoods like that (which already happen through the mail system, mind), but I'm open to hear.
I ask because speech is already restricted when it comes to advertising; companies are compelled to put up disclaimers, the FTC will come down on misleading ads, etc.
So, if society's surviving okay with those restrictions, is there a reason that political chicanery shouldn't be held to some standard also?
What is the free speech argument for not drawing a line at that?
I believe Zuckerberg's answer to that question was that such an ad would be banned. It's an explicit exception in the policy that permits lying in political ads, an exception that bans lies in service of voter suppression.
To the broader question, about whether all lies in political ads should be banned, the free speech argument against is that while it's easy to invent easy and obvious cases of lying, enforcing that policy in reality is very difficult and puts Facebook in the position of censoring speech that one side may consider a truth and the other may consider a lie.
He did not provide a bright line answer and hemmed and hawed quite a bit. He tried to reframe as “harm” but of course provided no clear definition there. So there’s “some” undefined policy that might maybe apply. He and the PR team really flubbed the obvious questions showing I think how uncomfortable and unclear they are internally about their policy and where to draw the line.
Sure outright lying in a way that can put someone in danger (e.g. printing false instruction on medical drug) should not be allowed.
The question is what should be the mechanism to do that. One way is to use courts, where everyone will get a fair hearing, rules will be the same for everybody, and won't change often. Another is to use Facebook moderators as judges, which does not seem to be a very promising path.
It is 100% legal to send mailers or put up billboards (which are not as regulated as shared spectrum for TV/radio) with the wrong election date to people, and this happens a couple of times every election cycle. Sometimes its government agencies, sometimes its a campaign (first example that popped up when googling: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/politics/spin-cycle/zeld...). I don't think any of them has been investigated by the FEC.
It's funny that I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments to reach a discussion that I think really highlights the crux of the problem. We know that social media platforms will take down content that is illegal. The issue is that it's legal for political parties (or anybody) to post false or misleading statements for the purposes of political propaganda.
AOC's hypothetical ad shouldn't be policed by Facebook, it should be policed by the police, or at the very least be an example of criminal defamation that is handled in the court system. I Am Clearly Not A Lawyer but I am surprised by looking at the existing legislation on criminal defamation that it's not.
We also shouldn't ignore that we are talking about ads. You can post political messages on Twitter, but Twitter won't promote that message in exchange for money. Facebook should follow suit.
Bravo. That whole thread is smart, well-reasoned, and puts democracy above profits. Good for them.
I particularly like his last point:
> A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”
And honestly, he’s totally right. This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.
> Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”
He was even more explicit:
> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”
I'm skeptical of this. Is a private charity promoting an LGBT fundraiser a political ad? What about Fox News pushing an ad about how other news is fake. Or MSNBC pushing an ad about Russia collusion? Was the now infamous Gillette woke ad political? It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
"Political advertising" may be limited to advertising that is bought for by political campaigns and PACs, which they have a previously defined policy for:
> The policy varies across markets but generally applies to ads that advocate for or against a candidate or political party, or ads by candidates and/or entities registered with their respective electoral commission.
edit: as u/ben509 pointed out, the above link only refers to political campaigns. Here's the link that defines "political content" as both campaigns and issue advocacy (at least in the U.S.)
Yeah, "political" is a weasel word like "extremist." A view I like isn't political, it's just common sense or settled science, it's the other guy's views that are "political."
Ah, the "I'm always right" argument. Settled science is an oxymoron. For 100s of years people believed things to be totally settled only for the fundamental concept to be proven false. Anyone who starts up with "settled science" is always relying on faulty reasoning.
Based on what he said, I don't think any of those will be blocked. It sounds like it's talking about campaign ads specifically, whether that's for people or issues.
I'm sure it will be better defined in the final policy.
Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it's really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can't be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.
Incumbents usually have a lot more money to spend on advertising though too. On average I doubt advertising helps challengers more than incumbents (there are always edge cases of course).
The research shows - contrary to common wisdom - that money only helps a campaign until it's reached all reachable voters with their message. After that, more spending does not matter.
It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.
It comes down to incrementality. Sure Trump has way more money than most challengers, but most people have also already made up their minds about him. His cost to acquire incremental voters is probably much higher than a lesser-known challenger.
I would expect that to require an extremely huge amount of money and be impractical.
Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.
Yeah I very much doubt Trump is wasting his money bidding on impressions for people likely to support Democrats (assuming he can accurately mimic the dems’ targeting) just to slightly raise the cost of Democratic campaigns
As someone who lived through Meg Whitmans's carpet bombing when trying to win the California governorship over Jerry Brown, it's hard to believe that would matter.
For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.
A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.
I have a hard time buying into that contrarian view in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. If anything, it feels like whataboutism to me. While Twitter is trying to deal with the mass corruption of democracy around the world from micro-targeted lies, they want to talk about some kid's high school student president campaign.
> And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. [...] This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.
Doesn't the same argument also apply to ads in radio, TV, newspapers, mass mailing, email campaigns, and paying a guy to hand out brochures? Would you agree that it is equally bad to allow political ads in all these contexts? Genuinely curious here if the principle is meant to be applied consistently, or if the internet is different somehow.
Those advertising methods don't allow you to micro-target based on people's private behavior. Micro-targeting and machine learning lets campaigns (like Cambridge Analytica's) generate what's effectively a thousand different campaigns, targeting exactly what triggers specific people the most. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from saying the exact opposite thing to two different people. That's what our current institutions may not be prepared to handle.
I wonder about this point. The universal declaration of human rights even mentions this in article 19, but few countries seem to actually uphold that value.
(I didn't downvote you but) I think the "elites" are the ones who most abuse the right to free speech, by controlling mass media and the public narrative, as well as conflating political contributions as "speech". Money talks.
When Jack says:
> This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.
Paying for reach and political influence has already pushed democracy to the breaking point. The symptoms are everywhere, from the appalling state of public healthcare, to regulatory capture in virtually every industry, especially financial. The "elites" are not a single group, but a fractured one with varying interests vying for power - but they do have one thing in common, which is using money as speech to control the narrative.
Thank you for not down voting me — but I’d love you just the same if you did. I find it difficult to rebut the argument you present with the following exception: in the US we have several hundred years of rigorous iteration in our legal system with respect to what is and what isn’t protected speech. For twitter to decide now and it this juncture that the speech it most dislikes is x, something about that doesn’t sit well. That said there’s long been an odd relationship between campaign spending and the media. Many local newsroom’s entire budgets depend on election years and yet we are supposed to believe they’re impartial. So I get that there’s a principle involved in this decision that they simply aren’t going to be like the local newsroom. That’s what they say... but who is going to watchdog this policy to make sure it really works like that and who is going to even notice when they inevitably make decisions that go beyond the criteria initially laid out? Seems to me rather than being a principled stand this is simply a way for them to create an ever shifting rule set to promote the speech they like while silencing speech they disagree with.
That sounds sensible, and I'd agree with you that Twitter's decision does raise questions about who gets to decide what's allowed to have "reach".
I suppose your parent comment sounded a bit too incendiary for civilized discussion. It did seem somewhat reductionist to say the "elites" are banning free speech to control the narrative.
It's possible that Twitter is biased in favor of certain political leanings; it could be that this decision is not as altruistic as it sounds; maybe there are hidden (or even unconscious) political motives. And, as you pointed out, there's no saying what may happen in the future, when someone else is in charge of the company. I think these are valid questions about the power they have to shape the public narrative, at least in their sphere of influence.
For me at least, I'd like to give Jack the benefit of the doubt and take his words and this decision as an honest effort in trying to be a responsible social media company.
>> It did seem somewhat reductionist to say the "elites" are banning free speech to control the narrative.
Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate how this makes sense in my view: the incumbent is always going to control the lions share of the so called free media. Two or three elections cycles ago, the average campaign didn’t know about a/b testing much less how to leverage social to level the playing field. Now everyone knows... now the incumbent no longer has the home field advantage... except.. twitter just changed the rules. One less platform that the challenger can leverage to play up to the incumbent. And let’s see, everyone thinks Jack is great so maybe some of the other platforms follow on... now technology is basically useless for the challenger.. so we are back to the old system where the incumbent takes the free media attention. A return to the status quo. Now why would social media have an interest in that? Oh I don’t know why does anyone have an interest in seeing entrenched politicians staying in power and yet that’s the system we’ve made for ourselves... oh I know pac money / citizens united are all code for republican money so I’m sure a lot of the commentators on here are thinking this will suppress that because that is the “only people who buy political ads” these days... but I’d ask you this - what if some challenger out there might have a chance of flipping a red state and changing the composition of the senate in 2020... except now one of the tools they could have used just disappeared... how do you feel now? Maybe political ads aren’t so bad if they keep incumbents from sticking around so long.
I hear you about the potential downsides and consequences of Twitter banning political advertising, one of which might be that incumbents have lost a platform to rally support.
On the other hand, this ban affects those in power as well - and it might be argued that they're the ones who disproportionately spend and have reach on social media. So I find it hard to imagine that this decision was conspired to suppress those who challenge the status quo.
I suppose we'll have to see how it turns out. Maybe incumbents have more of a chance, if they didn't have to compete on ad spending, but instead on "organic reach" of genuine supporters.
I'm a cynic, and skeptical of politics in general (with good reason, based on study of its shameful history..) but there's a stubborn optimist in there who wants to believe humanity - even the "elites", at least a few souls - have a shred of goodness and hope left to turn things around.
Well this sort of underscores the problem with this approach — who exactly is an elite? What exactly is political? We can’t even agree yet we think Twitter is going to be better at it than us? If it were up to me, I would design the platform as one in which all messages including those with mail-intent were allowed. Then I’d enable the client software to decide based on user preferences. Having a centralized scrutinizer is just a recipe for bad Ju-ju.
the use of fake account swarms to spread political ideology seems the more powerful use of twitter than legitimate ads. will we see a correspondingly brave effort to delete fake accounts?
Years ago I ran across a quote that went something like "Freedom of Speech gives you the right to own a printing press, not the right to use mine." I wish I could track down who said it.
That's basically what Jack is saying too. I don't see how "Freedom of the Press" could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That's never been the case.
You're absolutely right. There's a fine and subtle distinction to be made here - Freedom of the Press preserve the right of someone to seek to pay for reach for their expression and the right of those with reach to sell it.
As you say, this does not oblige anyone with a press to use it for any given person's benefit.
It just means that the basic concept of paying for expression and to expose other people to it is something baked into the First Amendment. Just not the Speech Clause.
I just found the perfect way to sum this all up and I'm making a prediction: NRA ads will be banned on twitter but Planned Parenthood ads will not. The total lack of self reflection and thinking on part of Twitter is really something else. Facebook made the right decision, Twitter made the wrong decision. It cannot be more obvious.
Given that practically for any issue of importance there's enough money on each side of the issue to buy a campaign on Twitter, it doesn't really matter. But if Twitter doesn't want to take money that would expose them to pressure over banning somebody's political speech (somehow nowadays it became ok in the US of A to call to ban your political opponent from speaking - who could have known that'd happen?) - it can be a sensible solution. Twitter would still be pressured to ban for politics (and probably would yield to that pressure, as it did many times before) but at least their revenue department would be kept out of this mess.
Speaking of 'Paying for reach'. The Supreme Court said (in 2014) there should be no limit on how much an individual can contribute to campaigns (money that is used to buy reach) - And Corporations are legal persons - so...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/politics/supreme-court...
Great. I think I already have just about all of them blocked anyway, and I only ever seem to see unsolicited ads on Twitter on my phone browser - UBlock Origin seems to be highly competent at wiping out all sponsored Tweets, root and nail, in desktop Chrome.
> This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle
Let's just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.
Sounds fine to me. You hold a popularity contest for the top job, the most popular person gets elected in a transparent fashion. It's very different than opaquely targeting individuals because you know what is going on and if you disagree you can do your own thing to win support.
Certainly with how media organizations are currently oriented and the assumption that those organizations will continue to be able to advertise or opine on candidates. But there is no definite reason that news network needs to be chasing stories 24/7 as they are now, that's a relatively new trend.
Twitter's entire net revenue isa small line item to google and youtube. Saying fuck you and being a small fraction of your opposition is not brave and totally useless.
Thought I don't have an objection to Twitter not accepting political advertising, their rationalization sounds like they're saying voters are too stupid to figure out what to believe so it's best if they are put in a bubble. It's interesting how closely this matches the arguments against labeling GMO foods because consumers are too stupid to decide for themselves if GMO food is harmless or not.
We love democracy. We love freedom. We love choice. But mostly in theory and not so much in practice when it comes to the masses. Anyone seen Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball hanging around?
One of the key aspects of political content on social media is that you don't necessarily need to buy ads to get your message in front of people. You can instead pay for an army of bots to spread your message and make it appear as genuine user generated content rather than a prepackaged advertisement. So while this decision by Twitter is in my opinion good, what are they doing to cut down on inauthentic political engagement that has become a hallmark of the platform?
You can also get an army of real actual people to spread your message and the company can just ban them and accuse them of being bots or having ties to some government without actual evidence.
Your comment is written in a way that implies that this happens. Do you have evidence to back that up? Not evidence that they take down suspected state-sponsored brigading, but that they were wrong?
> You comment is written in a way that implies that this happens.
I think his comment his written to imply that it is possible for this to happen. In which case, it does not require supporting evidence beyond the logical consistency of itself, which is sound, I believe.
That's also an interesting phenomenon. There are a large number of Chinese citizens on the internet who will shout down with comments any message counter to the party line there.
Both Hirschfeld and Osborne first logged in to their accounts in February 2011, well before the first known IRA activity in 2013. WIRED’s analysis found at least 63 accounts created between 2009 and 2013 included in the list provided to Congress.
It's reasonably well known to anyone who's used the site that old accounts are fairly frequently hijacked by others, so this doesn't invalidate Twitter's claim.
There was a talk [0] at Chaos Communication Congress 2 years ago about the early "political bots hype". Sadly in german and I'm not sure how great the provided translation is. It e.g. calls out "more than 50 tweets per day" being used as criteria to identify bots and concludes with more/better research is needed. Would love to hear an updated version or something alike, if someone has recommendations.
They've been going after bots and sockpuppets too when they find them. Either way at least removing the ability to forcibly promote ads in front of certain groups now they have to do that targeting themselves and it's more out in the open where it can be called out unlike the ads which you wouldn't see unless you were targeted.
At least it will take away the incentive from the all-powerful tech companies to stop pushing and optimizing political messages with their core-business interest. If they can't make money off of it, I'm sure these botnets will get more attention from their anti-abuse teams.
Active user totals and engagement numbers are still a big driver in valuations so the incentives still align with not cracking down too hard (as long as legitimate users aren't pushed away by the inauthentic content).
I imagine the following scenario: I'm the CEO of a social network trying to raise a new round of funding. I go to investors and say that we have 100M users on the platform and growing by 10M users per month. The investors like these numbers and decide to invest. A few years later, the investors find out that when I said 100M users, I actually meant 50M real human users and 50M bot users. When I said growing by 10M users per month, I actually meant by 5M real human users and 5M bot users per month.
Major League Soccer is going through this problem now. They prohibit political displays in stadium but are now in the business of deciding whether signs that say things like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" or "end gun violence" are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can.
I wouldn't have a problem with expanding that to include social issues. You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.
This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.
> You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.
Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.
But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.
Does it matter? The point isn't that tickets will become unaffordable, the point is that the sports leagues themselves will disappear.
Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.
I don't think that the impact of less professional sports on a societal level will be very significant, but if the reason to get rid of ads at sporting events is to make them better, then it's (probably) counterproductive to take steps that kill off a large portion of those events.
Clearly this apocalyptic prediction begs the question of how much investment is required, since we're have a variety of shorts with different levels of spending, and raising over the past 20 years. If there were 2se less money in football, it's unlikely to disappear
I don't think this is apocalyptic. It's not that football would disappear, but professional football leagues would or they would be diminished. I don't know whether that has a significant negative impact on society.
Sorta. I mean, corporations are not entirely apolitical. For instance, during a recent heated pipeline approval process in my region, the pipeline company was running “look at all the good we do” feel good ads all over the place. They are not directly saying “vote for so and so” but are promoting specific ideas. Like car companies promoting the idea that your car represents freedom - that’s not apolotical. Cities have been rebuilt to accommodate a lifestyle car companies promoted.
What is an ad? Can the beer cans say "Coors"? Can airplanes fly by with ads trailing? Can people's clothing display brands? Can the players' shoes have the Nike swoosh? Can pop-up shops sell their goods at the store or give out samples? Can a company buy tickets just to plant attendees who will loudly wear their brands? These are all forms of marketing. If they are permissible, then how do you enforce it? No billboards over a certain size? No audio or video ads?
Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.
Yes we must respect our corporate overlords, by their good graces we sit in their stadiums. It would be disrespectful to treat this private space like a public forum in any way. Even if the stadium WAS partially built using public funds...
What is functionally different between "marching down main street" and "walking down highways"? Many places basically have highways as psuedo main streets.
It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.
“I’m here for bread and circuses and I’d appreciate it if you kept your uncomfortable reality away from me so I don’t have to confront or think about it”
If you were a social movement that wanted to get your message across, you wouldn’t seek out a captive audience? The distuption is part of how to communicate
The difference is that it's easy to have "a private org can set its own logically inconsistent policy" (and every possible policy except "everything is allowed" is logically inconsistent) but impossible to have "we will only allow universally agreed upon good things in this space".
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.
American Cancer Society is a good example of an organization that is clearly, unambiguously political, but which most people probably don't want banned.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
My guess is that it depends how it is phrased, the imagery and the landing page. "Donate now", ok. "Donate now to keep NRA working for you", ok. "Donate now so we can fight policy XYZ", probably not.
This is really interesting, because it seems that in some cases (ex. NRA or EFF) it doesn't actually matter what the ad copy is. It's very clear why they're soliciting donations (to lobby for their ideological viewpoint).
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.
I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal.
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.
Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
I'm reminded of the dodge that religious institutions have achieved. In exchange for tax-exempt status, they are forbidden from explicit political stances and endorsements; yet in practice, many churches are highly influential in the political process, as they of course are allowed to take moral stances (abortion being the big one), and encouraging their congregations to "vote their consciences", etc.
Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.
The Sierra Club has a similar “dodge.” Most non-profits are tax exempt and many have separate PACs that aren’t tax exempt but are indirectly supported by their tax-exempt cohort if only by providing a mailing list from which to solicit donations.
I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example.
The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. But whether that satisfies the (both literal and metaphorical) parties who've been grousing about political ads on Twitter/FB is a different story. Twitter might correctly point out that a given contentious ad doesn't satisfy the FEC's definition and that still won't stop the complaints.
Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.
> The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those.
I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I've never heard of this definition of "political ad" - can you provide a link?
There'll be a lot of feeling out that line because it's impossible to draw a distinction that will work in every case. It'll be especially hard in cases where particular issues become heavily associated with one party or another though I guess they could just say product ads only, that would probably be a little easier because the line between a political and non-political product is a bit easier to draw.
Yes, but making a mistake on what is and isn't adult content or people seeing it when they shouldn't or vice versa doesn't have much negative impact on society. A private company that lets political gray area ads slip through from one side, but not the other, will likely have an impact on society.
What about my side project Read Across The Aisle? We make a free news reader app that helps people keep track of their media bias. That is inherently political (the whole point is to help people become more well-rounded), but running an ad for my free app shouldn't be seen as a political ad since we are devoutly non-partisan.
they aren't saying they're banning partisan advertising, they're banning political advertising. a non-partisan political ad is still a political ad.
that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.
Oh I realize that they wouldn't ban my ad. I'm saying that the heuristic you suggested isn't quite nuanced enough. It seems like this move will create lots of controversy and actually make political advertising on twitter more fraught (because it will still happen, but just not above-board). This may end up being a net negative for society if it pushes things into the seedier underbelly (gaming twitter's algorithms so your tweet pops up in the ICYMI section, buying followers in order to appear more influential, etc.).
Whenever these topics come up, the comment section is full of people advocating for no limits based solely on slipper slope arguments: who is going to determine what is politcal? Who is going to determine what is true?
But we all life with boundaries and we cope just fine. Why should this street in front of my house have a 35 MPH speed limit? What is special about 35? Why not 36? Why not 34? Who is to say that one is better than the other, so let's not try and all and let everyone pick their own speed.
Just as it would be possible, but stupid, to invoke slippery slopes to argue there should be no speed limits, invoking slippery slopes to argue against any regulation is a cop-out. Why not advance a real argument vs just arguing picking the optimal boundary is impossible?
The concern is about categories, not magnitudes, though.
A better analogy would be a certain tax rate for "cars" and another lower one for "trucks" so as to not harm blue collar small businesses. We would start seeing more personal vehicles designed to be "trucks" even if they weren't used for large hauls or some sort of business purpose.
And, of course, we already see exactly that happen to car designs.
The argument is that the incentives are there to follow the letter of the law and abuse the spirit, putting less onerous personalities at a disadvantage.
yep, the whole "who decides on the truth?" thing is extremely irritating. Do we throw out every court case now because apparently it's impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction, or to establish common rules or guidelines for conduct? We've been doing nothing else for thousands of years.
It's more of a, "what is fact and what is opinion," rather than, "what is fact and what is fiction."
"9 out of 10 doctors recommend Colgate," is a fact when Colgate picks the sample of doctors. A trained eye will realize that's actually an opinion, while it's designed to represent a fact. This works because people's opinions can be shaped by presenting an opinion as a majority.
This technique is probably one of the most commonly used and it has many variants, such as, "Your child could be in danger of edibles in their Halloween candy." Technically a fact, but actually a disguised opinion.
Treating everything as if the consequence of getting it wrong is sending an innocent person to prison doesn't make any sense. Courts don't even do that. They use different standards when imprisonment isn't an option.
and I don't see how this doctrine is violated if companies like twitter act with caution when in doubt. (which they have every incentive to do)
But nobody says "Johnny the crazy axe murderer gets to roam free because who is to decide what is true or not?" Which is just about where the speech debate is for some people.
Trying to make a slippery slope argument about a private corporations private, for-profit website is hilarious.
Twitter will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders.
If you don't want your communications to be under the total absolute control of a corporate entity you have no influence over, you might want to pack your bags and get off for profit social media.
You don't need to have an "argument" about "policy" on your own Mastodon instance. If upstream does something you don't like, you fork it. If another instance does something you don't like, you block it. Because thats actually your platform then.
Im scared of such arguments. And im telling you as a libertarian.
No, private companies should be regulated and shareholders cant be the only voice to be heard.
I mean, what if starbucks shareholders decide that, lets say, african americans are no longer allowed to buy coffe on their shops. Would it be ok to allow it?
I never said not to. But complaining on the platform itself is not petitioning your representatives to regulate Twitter. Its wasting time and throwing words into a bottomless hole.
And given the studies showing how little the will of the people influences the conduct of congress in the US I'd strongly consider petitioning the government barely a step beyond an equal waste of time.
Which isn't just rolling over and taking it - but actually fixing it goes way beyond a moment of outrage enshrined in text on the Internet.
But presumably, were this discussion taking place in 1963, there would be someone saying:
<company> will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders.
I think that's really beside the point I am making. My argument is that history is full of people defending the status quo, until it stops being the status quo. Then it becomes taken as truth that the new status quo is how things must be.
We can have discussions about what a business can and cannot do beyond what they are currently allowed to do.
That would be against the interests of the shareholders. But if they all got together and decided to do so, the result would be that racists would go under, and I do not want to help racists succeed in business!
And the grandparent just argued that we should easily be able to regulate companies. You're saying the opposite, now we can't regulate because they're quote-unquote "private"?
Well, which is it? Can we regulate for-profit companies for the good of the nation or not? If not, why not?
We already regulate companies through laws. Pass the appropriate laws! The alternative is that we hope for companies to self-regulate, which may or may not align with what's good for society.
If you have a user base in excess of 1% of the general population, you are a "Platform" and cannot restrict entrance by individuals or businesses, or full participation thereof, except upon a court order limiting said participation. [Fines t.b.d., but expect them to be punitive in nature.] This law supersedes any Terms of Service a provider might wish to enforce.
Want to enforce "whatever you want" on your "platform"? Stay below the 1% threshold and you're good. Otherwise, you need to interact with the public in a completely neutral manner.
> And the grandparent just argued that we should easily be able to regulate companies.
That is what you got out of comment? That certainly wasn't my argument, and rereading what I wrote, I still don't see how you get it.
Let me be succinct: I wasn't arguing for or against Twitter's actions or making any suggestions for what I would do. I was simply pointing out that making an argument solely on the grounds it is a slippery slope is vacuous.
Most cops won't hassle you for going 45 in a 35 zone unless it's meaningfully unsafe, and the Autobahn's speed limit "don't be an idiot" at human discretion.
One problem is the fuzzy nature of "political" advertising: For example, many people think of Planned Parenthood as a political organization, and some people think of Planned Parenthood as a health care provider. Ought Planned Parenthood to be allowed to advertise abortion services on Twitter?
I would say yes because it's not actually a political ad, a political ad would be 'support abortion rights', 'keep abortion legal', etc, what you're talking about is directly an advertisement of a service. It could blur the line depending on the exact content but just because a service has been politicized doesn't mean ads about that service inherently become political.
Heh... I find it funny that this issue underscores just how difficult it is for humans to uniformly decide on ground truth... but oh sure, let’s turn everything over to AI... that’ll be awesome! (Sorry for the non sequitor)
There are places where there are no speed limits. The autobahn for one.
Arguing against 'the optimal boundary is impossible argument' assumes you agree with his base axioms, that things like money are more important than the exploration of other principles. These are not slippery slope arguments, but the very base of politics itself. Why have any rule.
You are begging the question by assuming that the autobahn is valuable beyond a speed-regulated road. I will agree the autobahn has novelty value for the sake of it's own peculiarity, but that isn't something you can generalize as valuable for other roads. If going as fast as you would like was valuable for any reason beyond novelty and/or tourism, we would be doing it already.
I would like to think, using the autobahn as an argument to make the point that parent's post wasn't as self-evident as it could appear. I agree the autobahn has it's own value judgement to be discussed if one so wishes.
One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not.
The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in terms of decision making but I expect this will generate far more false positives in the end on the fringes and grey areas.
It's a good thing we'll now have two different experiments, on a large scale, to see which one is more self-destructive.
One of the main problems that I see is the outsized influence we've given to the very-vocal but small parties on social media to have on silencing other people and groups, going well beyond the limited free speech exceptions we previously observed in society for over a century (culturally, not just legally). Neither of these approaches really addresses that problem at FB/Twitter. Which is why I'm curious which one is going to expand those grey areas, where the abuse/downside risk remains, rather than reducing it.
I totally agree this policy will have many many false positives (to be explicit what that means to me: ads that are improperly classified as political and therefore not allowed).
And you know what? I’m totally OK with that! The content is still allowed on Twitter (and whether that’s a good/bad thing is a totally separate discussion). The only thing they’re saying is that they won’t let you pay to amplify its reach. Nobody (other than the advertiser) is going to shed a tear for those misclassifications.
It just means that a few more people will have to be naturally clever / viral / whatever to get their message out. And I’m totally OK with that too. There was once a world where Twitter wouldn’t take money from _anyone_ and everyone had to be clever to be seen or heard on the platform. Not such a bad thing.
> Under U.S. law, many falsehoods—even some deliberate lies—receive the full protection of the First Amendment. That is true even though “there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact,” as Justice Lewis Powell Jr. wrote for the Supreme Court in 1974. Nonetheless, the Court has often refused to allow government to penalize speakers for mistakes, sloppy falsehoods, and lies. Political lies are strongly protected; but even private lies sometimes are as well.
Does it? What if the government decides the earth is the center of the universe and imprisons the scientist who has observable proof that it isn’t? What’s if the government decides “encryption with backdoor is unsafe” is a false statement and suppresses all speech that says otherwise?
Slippery slope arguments like this are stupid because a government determined to be a bad actor isn't going to let a constitution stop them. Russia has a constitution, heck, Soviet Russia did.
The reality of having laws against broadcasting lies is that they will be applied sensibly if the rest of the system is sensible - and if it is not, you have worse problems.
Slippery slope arguments take into consideration the very human capacity to become accustomed to a certain boundary, and then seek to push beyond that boundary. For good or ill, look at the progression of rights leading to the current transgender/feminist argument over what constitutes a woman. 50 years ago that would not have even been a discussion.
You would be hard-pressed to ever see a government give ground where once they have asserted authority. Only encroaching further into our rights.
The people who will have control of the system have no incentive to be sensible; they have incentives to do what the executive government tells them to do and situations get very political very quickly. Consider the IRS vs conservative groups under Obama (according to Republicans).
The issue isn't a slippery slope as much as it is centralising power to a single point vulnerable to corruption & allowing politically charged decisions to be hidden behind opaque bureaucratic processes.
The problem with laws is you need people to enforce them.
The problem with law enforcement is you need people to pay them and tell them what laws to enforce.
The problem with lawmakers is you need some means to determine who gets to make the laws.
The answer is the guy with more guns and pointy sticks. The guy with more guns gets to tell you that while you’re in his land, whatever land it is, you’re going to give him money or goods.
Social contract theory mitigates this to a degree, by specifying the method by which you select who the guy with the most guns is. Sometimes it’s more than one guy. Sometimes it is a lot of them, and they all counterbalance each other, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that what keeps them in power is a piece of paper and all the guns they’ll ever need to back up what it says on the paper. Everything else is norms and traditions and processes. This is power.
The problem with social contract theory is that the contract can say anything. You just need enough people with enough guns to agree that this contract serves their interests enough.
Well the US Constitution wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written by, largely, Englishmen and some other Northern Europeans subject largely to English rule. They already had values and cultural norms and traditions, they just needed the document. Well they had one already, several actually, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutions of every State. The Articles were not doing the job of serving the interests of the people, in the view of the framers and Madison in particular, and they swapped it out.
Now go read Article I. Examine the structure. There’s a selection process, and there’s minutia about procedure, and there are limitations. The Article I branch is Congress, it is the supreme authority of the government, not coequal with the Presidency or SCOTUS, you were lied to about that, but above them. If Congress were one guy and could speak with one voice, it could do almost anything, impeach and remove the President, any sitting Judge, any Officer of the government, amend the Constitution, and declare war at will.
These are very good reasons why Congress isn’t one voice, and it is many.
Now to get back to what you were saying, the problem with with laws against things like “broadcasting lies” is you don’t know that they will be applied sensibly. The more laws you have to begin with, then more rope you have to hang the citizenry.
The First Amendment, and for that matter the Second and Third, the reason they are as ironclad as they are is specifically to prevent abuses by the Federal Government. It was to appease the faction at the time known as the Anti-Federalists who felt, rightly in my opinion, is that the more guns you give the Federal Government, the more potential abuses for power because there will be (have been and are) who will attempt to co-opt the Federal Government to wield those guns.
Congress doesn’t need the power to determine what is a lie and what isn’t. You don’t need laws to punish liars. If you have faith in sensible systems, then the system you want to have faith in is the people. If you don’t have that, then you can’t have faith in Congress.
Government can't just "decide to be a bad actor", the system wouldn't let it. If they could do it, they all would do it a long time ago (and many have indeed tried, from Watergate to now Trump). Bad actors need to be able to control the regulatory bodies and media first before they can consolidate their absolute power - and the power to censor anyone is one of the necessary steps to get there.
That would be a big problem for religion and indeed science. Religion is largely based on faith so cannot be 'true' or 'false'. Science is based on theory. Scientists may disagree as to what is true.
The UK is infamous for its ruinous libel lawsuits against people who dare to say true things about the rich and powerful. It was so widely abused that the US ended up having to introduce a law blocking our libel suits fronm being enforced over there.
Controversial Suggestion: People discern truth for themselves like they always have and will always continue to do. True and Trustworthy are two very different things when it comes to human instinct. Something that is true but not trustworthy due to lack of feedback may be wrong in the future. Furthermore something that proves to be trustworthy on some subjects might not be the same on others
I think cases like George J. Stinney's prove that it is not a reliable process. Best is to avoid any judgment when it is not necessary, like limiting freedom of expression.
It would be more accurate to say that deliberate lies are sometimes not free speech as decided by the courts. These circumstances include false advertising, libel, and slander.
Even in these cases, 1A does not allow the government to prevent such speech (that is, prior restraint). These are not criminal issues. If you engage in any of these practices you may be liable for civil judgments, but that's the extent of it.
It's true that there are limitations on 1A. But these are very frequently misunderstood. For example, the bit about "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is incorrect.
>Even in these cases, 1A does not allow the government to prevent such speech (that is, prior restraint). These are not criminal issues. If you engage in any of these practices you may be liable for civil judgments, but that's the extent of it.
That's incorrect. There exist many statutes that criminalize certain commercial speech. And 15 states have criminal libel laws on the books. SCOTUS hasn't ruled that criminal liable laws generally violate the 1st amendment even though they have overturned many examples in the past.
And there is no general prohibition against criminalizing speech that isn't protected by the first amendment such as fraudulent or illegal commercial speech.
> The First Amendment is about government suppression of speech
It is exactly that, but that doesn't actually end the real conversation people are trying to have.
Do we support the idea that the govt shouldn't restrict speech, but that we as society should? There are a lot of "chilling" effects seen in history.
On other hand, TOTALLY unrestricted speech is a completely different ball of wax, complete with plenty of hairballs in there. There's the ever-present (yet valid) "what about child porn", but there's also a lot of the issues that are arising in recent years with explicitly false statements and representations designed to influence the average person. Sure, such statements can't survive enough research, but it's easy enough to make it hard to research, to create conventional wisdom that is just wrong. Society where we cannot trust "facts" cannot sustain - it will fracture into separate societies in which trust CAN be held.
And on the gripping hand, we have those that argue for truly unrestricted speech in words, but actually just have confidence that their viewpoint will win out, not by virtue of reason and logic but by virtue of fear and hate.
When I was young, I believed in absolute free speech. I'd quote Voltaire, I'd defend any attempt to allow communication, even that which made me uncomfortable, but I did it for noble reasons. A lot of my more liberal views came about because I supported the efforts of those that made me uncomfortable to express themselves. Nowadays, despite those personal growths, having seen how much we CAN'T handle truly free speech, I'm much more hesitant.
Clearly excessive suppression of speech, be it from the govt or be it from society, is terrible. But now I'm horrified to see that truly restricted speech just empowers demagogues. It ends up not being truly free speech either, as it creates fear of reprisals that can't be proven. It promotes the name of speech while restricting the ideal.
We need to discuss what our true objective is. We can't find the line yet, perhaps we never will, but perhaps we can narrow down the grey area a bit.
But right now, we have the believers in unrestricted speech as a noble ideal, with users of unrestricted speech to restrict ideas hidden among them, arguing with those that are fine with the govt not restricting speech but wanting social protections, with a decently large group that is wondering if keeping the govt out fully and leaving it to social repercussions is perhaps flawed that also joins in.
Saying "the first amendment only restricts the govt" is a fine statement about the current law. It doesn't address anyone's actual concerns though.
People make this point every single time this comes up like they've contributed something interesting or new, it's exhausting.
No one has said the constitution applied to Twitter. Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
Yet free speech still has a huge cultural role in western countries that goes well beyond government charters, for very good reasons. That's the reason why it's embedded in law in the first place, not the other way around.
>People make this point every single time this comes up like they've contributed something interesting or new, it's exhausting.
Almost as exhausting as people saying it's exhausting.
>No one has said the constitution applied to Twitter. Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
Odd way for the GP to open up an argument then.
>One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not.
If everyone knows that it doesn't apply, then everyone should just leave it out to begin with. Also, in implementation, it absolutely has conditions. 0/2.
>Yet free speech still has a huge cultural role in western countries that goes well beyond government charters, for very good reasons. That's the reason why it's embedded in law in the first place, not the other way around, we didn't start caring about free speech because the US constitution adopted it, nor should we dismiss it where government rule ends
Huh? It was added because the founders had first hand experience with government suppressing rebellious rabble rousers who threatened their power. It guaranteed freedom of religion, the press, and assembly. Of course that's what they were fighting for. In what way did it go "beyond government charters"?
I am the OP and I specifically referenced the first amendment as an analogy to highlight the dangers of grey areas, which are the things the constitution avoids by making them absolute. Which is where all the risk remains with this sort of policy, and the reason why it's relevant to Twitter.
Saying the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies is meaningless in that context.
Context matters. Pigeonholing a tired counter argument where it doesn't fit isn't contributing to this conversation. Although I suspect you didn't actually read the comment before replying, only the first sentence.
Tangentially invoking a hot-button issue like the first amendment is at best a tactical error in that it distracts from your actual point. In this case, your analogy is flat wrong because the first amendment actually does have lots of grey area (I mean, you can choose not to recognize the USSC's interpretation as valid, but it won't help). In response to your underlying argument about special cases being bad: tough. We don't have a choice. A finite policy can only ever be an approximation to justice.
I think they were replying to the "Everyone knows" part of the statement. That is, the first amendment only applies to use of government power, but many people don't actually know that.
See my other message in this thread for some examples (from today!) of people who think the first amendment is relevant when talking about private companies.
I love it when people make the point you're responding to.
> Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
You say that, and yet …
"@jack .Something smell really"fishy here".I don't agree with. I don't get it.Hidden socialism in plain sight.Chaos & Anarchy .Blasting the first amendment .This declaration remind me of the Russia ,Cuban revolution .A cruel dictatorship Socialism/Communism . Extremely dangerous !" https://twitter.com/albertobmas/status/1189659185258147841
"Right. Sure. We all believe this one. Aside from being against the First Amendment, no one can possibly be stupid enough to believe Twitter will stop pushing the leftist agenda. Only those with an R or conservative leaning will be stopped. Yawn" https://twitter.com/SharonRaeL/status/1189641756947746819
"And who decides that the political advertising is earned? and isn’t this a violation of the first amendment rights? And what is the process for earning said right which is enshrined in the Constitution to advertise their beliefs or interpretation of fact? @tedcruz @realDonaldTrump" https://twitter.com/TheMightyMacky/status/118963820772345446...
If you mention the first amendment in the context of a private organization and you don't explicitly note that you understand that it doesn't technically apply in this situation, I'm going to associate your argument with the arguments of the people quoted above.
No, but I sure bet Twitter wants to have the Safe Harbor protections. By deciding (editing) what is posted on the site, they would seem to forfeit the protections.
It doesn't have conditions because it's a vague guideline. The actual implementation of the first amendment has many, many conditions. It is not possible to codify subjective concepts like "freedom" and "speech" without conditions.
Arguments about whether Twitter is subject to FoS aside; censorship would entail deleting tweets, not rejecting adverts.
Speech is not reach. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard, it is the right to speak your mind. If people decide to not listen to what you say (followers), you have no right to force them to (adverts).
> One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions.
It does. You cannot shout "fire" to incite a panic for malicious purposes. We already determine that those lies are not protected by the First Amendment.
> the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
To be fair Twitter already has a lot of prohibitions in place for ads, many of them very subjective (e.g. Hateful Content and Inappropriate Content) so the free speech boat sailed a long time ago.
I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (at least on Twitter, and on any other platforms that follow this policy).
Even further, it is well known that Twitter throttles follow counts and shadow bans people They Don't Like™, so Twitter is already artificially promoting some people, and demoting others. And that's before we get into the outright suspensions.
Twitter doesn't have organic speech, period. And now they're justifying why they allow some political ads, but not others.
The other side of the original argument is this: someone like The Rock has a huge advantage, but on the other hand anyone without a following will be at a huge disadvantage. What happens if a celebrity politician tweets a falsehood like "my opponent supports VileIdeaXYZ" and the opponent has 300 Twitter followers and can't pay to promote a tweet?
I don't think a system that favors people based on how much money they have access to is great, but I also don't think a system that elects people based on their fame is great. Having both paid and unpaid options for reach provides a little bit more balance.
Running an outright dirty campaign would break ToS. So even if they were protected from deletion by virtue of being a politician, their tweets would no longer be included in feeds. It'd be political suicide.
Proper enforcement is hard. They won't get there soon. It'll come slowly for a few years to avoid mistakes. When AIs get reliable at detecting lies/harassment, enforcement will become the norm. (my prediction)
One might say this is good as it will increase organic participation in elections and politics.
If that organic component is bad like The Rock running terminator style, that may be very obvious given there isn't an astroturf campaign to keep that bad organic support alive.
The effect of "meritocracy", at least in this context, is not linear. Every incremental unit of influence or fame (followers, impressions, etc) leads to super-linear influence between some interval (probably tapers off at the tail).
And it is not independent / non-zero sum. If "A" gets more influence, it may take from "B"'s opportunity. And if the growth function is indeed super-linear, then B's opportunity is very quickly squashed.
It shifts the burden away from twitter, thats why it s a smart move. In the grand scheme of things it s not really more meritocratic. A bunch of awareness campaigns will no longer be possible, so we won't know if they had merit
I think this should be the top comment, not buried on (currently) page two. The debates about truth in political advertising and Facebook are about something different. Both are valid issues to discuss, but it’s off topic.
What matters when running for an elected office is visibility and recognition. This recognition and unpaid organic reach may have not been what won Trump the US Presidency, but there is little doubt it won him the republican primary.
Freedom of expression inherently includes the freedom to pay for expression.
What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city?
But then again, since twitter is a private enterprise, I fully respect their right to act on their own platform.
Citizens United is the example that shows it's more complicated than that. Once limits are removed, then the same power structures that make and keep powerful entities powerful can continue to be reenforced if checks are not put into place to limit the power money can have in being a vector or amplifier for free speech.
What paying for expression has come to is that you can dominate discourse simply by paying more. So if you have money, you can buy influence even more directly than by paying for bribes and courting legal ramifications.
The reality is marketing works, and that is to say, people's opinions can be changed quite malleably by just inundating them more-and-more with the idea you want them to adopt, whether it's seeing a movie, listening to an album, or adopting an opinion.
Freedom for all cannot exist where power can buy influence in this fashion, and that's where freedom to pay for expression is more complicated than, say, printing my own newspaper and sharing it with others. It lets you also gain the system and buy-up all options of expression (e.g., all ads in a newspaper or website) and in the more insiduous ways, buy "grassroots" influencers through sockpuppet accounts.
I don't have a solution, but it doesn't mean there's not a fundamental problem when we make freedom to pay for expression free of roadblocks to dominating behaviors.
Ads sometimes help the underdog much more than they help the already-known incumbent - ads can put them both on equal footing if the volume is reasonable.
I've discovered new small family restaurants I never would have noticed if I didn't get their postcard ads. Similarly, thanks to ads I've heard of new political candidates challenging long-time incumbent politicians - they may be spending much less than the incumbent but they could afford to write me a postcard.
Maybe instead of a digital ban, there could be rationing on a per-user basis of how often they are repeatedly shown a political ad from the same faction. That way challengers can get their word in.
Arguably the problem is that the limits on contributions to candidates and parties puts them at a specific disadvantage. PACs and advocacy-as-journalism partly exists because political parties are restricted while relatively unaccountable organizations are not.
No, not at all. Freedom of expression is the right to say your piece to willing listeners. It's a guarantee the state won't interfere in most speech, not a guarantee that rich people can buy an audience.
Cellphones and internet connections are content-neutral pipes that convey content between a willing listener/reader and a speaker they select. So paying for those is a very different case than buying ads, and especially buying false ads.
Especially now that we're 25+ years into the web era, I don't think there's a strong argument for the legal necessity of paid political advertising at all. If I'm curious about candidate or an issue, I can find out anything I want from anybody who can use two thumbs to type something into a box on Facebook or Twitter. I can also get vetted content from a variety of aggregators, from commercial media to non-profit election guides to Wikipedia-style references to my friends sharing things on social media.
Given that, a law saying, "Nobody can pay for reach," certainly wouldn't harm democracy any. And it might help. So I think this is a great step forward on Twitter's part.
There’s no such thing as “legal necessity” to allow something. Our law is based on what is not allowed, instead of what is allowed. There’s an increasing drive towards banning more things and that’s fine if they are warranted, but I hope that we never get to the point where there are a set of action that we are _allowed_ to do.
Sure, but did you really not understand what I meant?
We outlaw things when a) they cause sufficient harm, and b) don't have sufficient countervailing utility. E.g., kitchen knives remain legal even though people are murdered with them, but you aren't allowed to buy a tactical nuke. I'm saying that whatever previous necessity drove us to allow political advertising despite the historically obvious harms, the Internet makes that much, much smaller.
In 1971 the US Supreme Court ruled on this very issue, stating that if it costs more than what the average person can pay for, then paying for speaking restricts freedom of speech.
They compared the cost to mail a letter vs a commercial. At the time they stated, "$1000 is beyond the reach of the majority." which at the time was what campaign donations were limited to.
Not to mention the fact that "politics" winds up being a very wide swath. I will be interested to see how Twitter classifies this.
1. Suppose you advertise for an donations to an adoption charity? Finding good homes for children is surely universally recognized as a wonderful, noble cause. Advertise on Twitter.
2. Now suppose the adoption charity partners with and funds pregnancy centers needing adoption services.
3. Now suppose that many of these partner pregnancy center don't offer or recommend abortion services.
4. Now suppose that proposed legislation requires pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion, with resistance from these pregnancy centers.
5. The organizations directly funded by your charity are now embroiled directly in one of the most hot-button political issues of the last 50 years.
Is your charity now political? Can it run ads on Twitter?
---
Note: A common misconception is that there is no such thing as 509(a) political charity. This is incorrect. Non-profits are only restricted from supporting political candidates. They can support political issues all they want and do limited lobbying.
The easy thing is for Twitter is to just use 509(a) status as the yardstick for bordline orgs, but that line would be far into the "politics" space.
> What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city?
Absolutes don't really work well in the real world: there are too many trade-offs to be balanced and too many positive goals that are at tension with each other. For instance, and absolute right to paying for free expression sounds nice in isolation, because we value free speech. But we also value democracy, and democracy doesn't work well when an oligarchy or foreign power can use its massive wealth overwhelm and confuse the expression of the common people.
Free speech comes with downsides just like every other thing. The alternative is to censor some things and allow other things, which work fine until more and more things gets banned, sometimes out of good intention. I’m totally onboard with banning hate speech and so on, but we need a very hard line of freedom somewhere that no bans get to cross, to me, this crosses it
The word "censorship" has a lot of moral baggage, and using it here obscures more than it clarifies. Not all limits on speech are censorship. For instance, it's not "censorship" to insist everyone speak in turn, and to tell someone who's continuously shouting their opinion over others to shut up and let others speak. That scenario is very similar to putting limits on how much someone or some group can "pay for expression."
IF google and microsoft came to an agreement over what people where allowed to email, it would be pretty interesting to see if most people just accepted censorship on private communication. To an extent they already do so, in that they block spam at their discretion. Do you respect that same right for google and microsoft to ban the propagation of pro-political-opinion-you-dont-agree-with from their platforms?
A better example would be something like the NBA's situation in China currently. If a government has the market power to determine what those in a private enterprise should be able to say, is that a situation that we accept?
I don’t think the age of their account should be a factor in the validity of their arguments.
It would be one thing if our rights were restricted so that we could never pay for reach of expression. That seems like it would be a violation of free speech. But in this case (as noted) it’s a private entity enforcing their own legitimate policy exclusively on their own platform.
I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be okay by Twitter's standards, but obviously they're still currently taking down content that breaches their policies in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'm really interested in seeing where Twitter goes, I think Dorsey plays realpolitik sometimes but I don't think he has the same goals as Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, and Dorsey could just be a next-level showman, but I'm hopeful that he might do something truly interesting with the platform. I've still never made a Twitter account.
From what I recall in the JRE and Sam Harris interviews, Jack seemed very reasonable. I think Twitter is something that's gotten away from him (certainly from what he'd like) and is being run by the inmates to a significant degree.
That was my impression as well. It was interesting to see Jack answer and then have the legal council (?) amend Jack's answers or push them in a specific direction. It's very clear that there is a mismatch between what Jack wants, what Twitter shareholders want, and what Twitter's activist pseudo-employee contingent wants.
Unsure if you’re asking who is running twitter or what’s meant by ‘inmates’ so will attempt to answer both.
I suspect it’s marketing people / short-sighted profit minded people rather than the legal team running the place.
And if you are asking about inmates meaning, it’s an idiom, “the inmates are running the asylum” meaning the least useful/knowledgeable people have taken over from the competent.
I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.
Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.
I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.
To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.
Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.
So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.
It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message.
Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it.
If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility.
I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.
I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost
Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)
So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.
Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course. Still , he s the only one who dares give Trump a megaphone. I think he handles the whole situation exceptionally well.
> Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course
Since the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can't be a "libertarian" and lean "left", that's completely incompatible, or I'm not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.
However shouldn’t the president have a “megaphone?” In the old days, when a president spoke, the media would “interpret” what he said. Politicians being able to speak directly to the population is a good thing.
I like that politicians can speak directly to the media—I just wish orgs like Twitter would apply their rules and guidelines fairly to everyone.
I'm starting to see these "rules" more like "laws," and starting to look more closely at how some of these platforms are governed in the same way I look at how governments are governed:
- Who makes the laws?
- How does one become a lawmaker?
- How long can one be a lawmaker?
- Who enforces the laws?
- How strong is the rule of law?
- What are the consequences of breaking a law?
- etc etc.
My impression of Dorsey is that he doesn't really know anything but me makes statements (like the OP, and the Bitcoin gunk, and making Twitter more "conversational") that don't make sense or stand up to scrutiny, but use a bunch of words that try to convey a position of leadership on not topics.
Good for them, and good for us. Without controlling bots and sockpuppets, it's not a total fix. Still, a step in the right direction.
Given the larger overlap between Facebook users and people who vote, we'll need follow-up from Zuckerberg to really make this stick. Step in the right direction.
Twitter has been famously hugely toxic to humanity and democracy for years, and that was strictly on the non-ads side of content, and Dorsey has refused to do anything about it because he craves those engagement numbers. Paid ads are a sideshow distraction.
I don't follow politics nor do I follow these discussions, but I wonder how many people are influenced from a politic ad vs how many people are influenced from bots. I'd _guess_ bots are much much much much more influential.
Wow. That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no?
I totally support it. But I've also got to be brutally honest: I wonder if this is a sincere moral stance on Dorsey's part, or more of a business calculation that, leading up to the lightning-rod 2020 election, accepting political ads ultimately has the potential to do more damage to Twitter's reputation than the money would make up for -- or have them wind up being on the wrong side of, and in the subsequent targets of, whoever does win.
> That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no?
OTOH, it means political messaging on the platform will be entirely controlled by how the firm manages the organic newsfeed, which even if in theory it is subject to election and campaign finance laws, there is very little regulatory experience or direct case law on. Shutting out official ads actually magnifies managements freedom to shape the political narrative and the relative power of illegal influence operations.
And non-obvious astroturf probably is better for engagement on the platform than overt political ads.
So why not use the same methodology on TV or print as well and ban political ads across? Why is social media singled out here? What about ads on YouTube? This is nothing but a copout solution. Twitter doesn't have the will nor the capital to be part of the debate here (and political ads are likely too small for them to care) - so they are trying to gain strategy credit by just saying this is a bad idea.
NYTimes is happy to take money for political ads while they are shouting that FB and Twitter should do fact checks.
IMO the difference is a combination of two things:
* the unprecedented targeting ability of social media ads vs traditional broadcast/print
* the unprecedented amount of disinformation (especially from foreign governments) vs traditional broadcast/print
If you can't see the difference between the two, frankly, you haven't been paying attention.
Foreign govt can also pay for political ads via TV/print as well. Most of the foreign govt interference is not via ads but via organic channels such as FB Pages, FB user accounts, Twitter accounts/bots. Those will continue to operate regardless of this decision by Twitter
Perhaps because of hyper targeting? News media and fact check sites cannot even see some ads that are shown since they are not in the target market, so they cannot fact check or report on them.
Unless another recourse is found then banning all political ads will increase the role prior name recognition plays in politics. It is difficult for lesser known politicians to overcome incumbents and this would make it even more difficult.
Another recourse, would, for example, be unbiased open debates where candidates can promote themselves, I think this is a great idea personally but it won't work without
1. Public funding.
2. Actual enforcement of the unbiased natures of these debates.
CNN rejecting Trump ads is akin to Fox rejecting Warren ads given how they are politically aligned. Facebook is trying to be neutral here and let people (and journalists who will write on such ads) decide vs. trying to come in with their own judgment. This has been happening on TV/Print ads for decades now.
Fox News has hired many democrats in the past. That doesn't mean their content doesn't meet the same muster of more professional news organizations that don't have narratives that are delivered from the top down.
Roger Ailes is gone as of July 2016. There is no longer anybody conservative running Fox News. Median political opinion in the USA (maybe not your neighborhood) is to the right of Fox News. To maximize audience, Fox News is as left as it can go without being left of any notable competitor. Because there is no significant competition to the right, Fox News can grab more audience by going left.
Meanwhile, over at CNN, there actually is a narrative delivered from the top down. Every day at 9 AM, Jeff Zucker has a call in which he directs the anti-Trump message of the day. Info about it got leaked a couple weeks ago: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/10/14/exposecnnpart1/
Jeff Zucker gets directly involved. He even went into the control room during an interview to disable ads, extend a 7-minute interview to 25 minutes, and instruct the interviewer to “Just fucking nail her!” in reference to guest Kellyanne Conway. He says “I am the one saying we should just stay on impeachment.”
An employee laments that “we used to cover news,” and “we used to go out and do stories.”
So this is 2019. Don't be the frog slowly boiled in the pot. CNN has been very badly corrupted by narratives that are delivered from the top down.
You're saying that it is inconsistent for Twitter to not accept payment for political ads, but a print newspaper to do so. This is correct. But that inconsistency reflects the fact that the decisions are being made by different people.
What would be a non-copout solution that twitter could implement?
Twitter can just follow Facebook here and let public/journalists evaluate the truthfulness of the campaigns vs. doing it themselves (as that is open to interpretation). If print media and TV channels can do that, why can't social media?
If we a society decide that Twitter shouldn't be the arbiter of valid and invalid political advertising, why is them avoiding the issue entirely a bad thing?
It's probably because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have blamed a small Facebook ad campaign for losing their campaign, so the hysteria has built from that.
Surely we can come up with some way of giving candidates a platform to share their ideas? The current system is broken, we should think of ways of fixing it instead of just saying we can't do better.
What defines a political ad? For example are prolife ads political, even if they mention no laws or politics? What about ads that do not mention politics but are targeted to influence policy? Seems like an ambiguous category except for outright promoting particular candidates and laws.
This level of pedantry drives me up the wall. Not everything needs to be invented from first principles.
Profile ads are banned, yes, because they involve teh candidates. Policy ads are banned because they again involve politics.
We can start anywhere! Let's say 'nothing from any entity that receives money from a political party'. Or 'anything mentioning election candidates'. Or 'anything with certain keywords in it'.
What you're not stopping to ask yourself is 'who are the kinds of people that need to advertise about politics'? Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!
It's not pedantry at all. Look at F1's battle with cigarette advertising for a concrete example. Certainly, explicit advertising is easy to stop, but there are many ways of advertising things surreptitiously.
A great example of this is Ferrari's evolution to avoid the F1 cigarette ban. They started with the word Marlboro on the side of their car, then they moved to a barcode that resembled a pack of cigarettes, and now they are partnered with a front company called Mission Winnow (google it, it's really interesting) that is widely believed to be subliminal advertising for Marlboro.
The point is that this is a policy that is hard to enforce because it is ambiguous. The system worked as intended if you think that the point was to make only the most well-financed and technically savvy advertisers able to receive a benefit.
> The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.
We have 1 user on the internet vs $1 Billion in advertising budget. I'm going to trust that Philip Morris is better at quantifying the effect here.
> Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.
This still has nothing to do with laws. It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.
My argument is in no way proscriptive. Only descriptive.
The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.
> It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.
> The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.
This is mostly incorrect. There are _some_ countries where tobacco advertising laws are the reason for Formula 1's tobacco advertising ban, but the rule being circumvented is FIA's tobacco ban. Interestingly, in countries where tobacco advertising is illegal, Ferrari often changes their livery to not include Mission Winnow.
With each such iteration, the advertising punch is diluted. At this point, it's a stretch to imagine someone seeing the mirrored M-W logo and going "God, I need a smoke". In this way, we are all the better for it.
People not thinking things through, which, yes, means working them out from first principles, are why we have so many stupid and broken laws, policies, regulations, etc.
> Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!
I'm sure you'll be shocked and outraged when a story lands in a few months because someone you like is protesting this policy.
And you're going to tell me a bunch of anons on HN are bout to invent it from first principles?!
While 'we' (I'm not American) might have plenty of stupid laws, we also have some very good ones. We've gotten there by taking necessarily-flawed first steps. I have no doubt Twitter will overlook something. But I'm glad they're doing it anyway, and we will get somewhere better in steps. It's better than navel gazing about "What's a law anyway?"
Also, granted, GP didn't explicitly state that he's against the law, but this kind of smug, condescending slippery slope argument keeps getting brought up all over HN, hence my over the top reaction. So many thread seem to devolve into this kind of pointless "Yeah but define <> first" at the hands of Rationalists™ and are worse for it. They get nowhere and it makes for infuriating reading.
It's not that hard. The UK (and I believe most of Europe) has heavily regulated political advertising. Politicians can't advertise on billboards here, and TV slots are strictly regulated (and time-limited). I'm not entirely sure what criteria are used, but it seems to work reasonably well.
Indeed, and newspapers are arguably problematic too. But I think it demonstrates that regulation can be done without the definition of what it covers being too controversial.
Lots of democracies have legal definitions for what counts as political advertising. Obviously Twitter doesn't have to use those definitions, but there are fairly clear guidelines in a number of jurisdictions. And it doesn't have to be a situation where they set rules for life: taking a firm apolitical stance on advertising likely requires reassessing the rules over time. But it is doable.
What will be really interesting is whether Twitter tries to work with governments or whether they unilaterally come to their own rules. There be dragons on both fronts.
Their heart's in the right place, but mechanically, doesn't this shift the money from "pay for an ad on Twitter" to "pay for a bot farm / human clickfarm to like and reshare the tweet?"
Twitter's engagement model (popularity ∝ importance) is still flawed in gameable ways, and political operations have the money to pay to play those games.
>paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle
Ignoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he's basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling, which I find interesting. If we're going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn't have anything to do with being online.
> We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.
Will they also ban politicians? Accounts buy followers to grow and look legit, including politicians. Just removing ads isn't removing power of money, as people are (and will be) spending a lot of money to get organic reach.
Some of their most popular accounts are politicians accounts. That brings tons of traffic to Twitter and makes money for them.
While I don't disagree with their decision, I think they maybe overstating positive impact it'll have.
Accounts can artificially inflate their follower count with money, but they can't use money to make _me_ follow them. I think that's the difference with paid advertising, where you can buy the ability to reach anyone.
So be it. At least from their business side, they are clearing themselves of responsibility. They are a company, they dont have a duty to arbitrate political discourse in general.
This is certainly, on the surface, a great leveling of the influence between oligarchical interests and the people. I'm hopeful it will play out that way. I suspect that the oligarchs will simply redouble their efforts on buying bots and influencers instead of clearly marked adverts.
This is certainly more expensive for them, more uncertain, and more likely to blow up in their faces if someone is determined to have been paid. Certainly it may also reduce attainable reach.
It's difficult to see how this will play out even though the alternative strategy is obvious. Hopefully the people will chalk some advantage.
EDIT: As others have noted, corporations, which are inherently right wing, will still be able to promote their messaging, so there is some disadvantage to the left. Marketing pay-day loans? That's a right wing exploitative program for example.
Genuinely impressed by this statement. They seem to have put some real thought into this, and like it or not, they're an advertising company rejecting business for what they see as the greater good. Bravo.
It's also a smart business decision. Avoiding the entire scrutiny and questions of regulation is worth more than the (modest) amounts spent on online political advertising.
Twitter doesn’t have much political advertising, unlike its rival. This is a probably very effective PR move more than anything. Timed to coincide with FB’s earnings no less.
In many European countries, including France where I'm from, there are never any political ads until an election season (which could either be tradition or regulation). During election season political ads are tightly regulated to prevent someone with a higher ad budget from swarming the "airwaves" with the kinds of disinformation/propaganda that is so prevalent on U.S. television networks and other media.
Political ads (and statistical coverage of early poll results) is also banned in the days before a major election to diminish the impact of manipulation/disinformation campaigns (discouraging voters because they assume their vote won't matter).
Apparently there will be exceptions for encouraging voter registration. But will people be able to target these ads in ways that blatantly (or subtly) target members of a particular party?
Can I promote a tweet encouraging people in a particular state to register to vote? Probably. What if I target people who like the NRA or Planned Parenthood? Same question for voter turnout tweets ("don't forget to vote tomorrow!"). The devil is in the details.
This will definitely help the party and candidates that are barely raising any money compete with the one that is breaking all records. It would be like a fire hose competing with a squirt gun. We just can't allow that.
Good luck with that. Anything that can put in a good light some public policy or is remotely related to some politician can be seen as political ad.
Politicians already make use of that kind of veiled advertising with hot button issues. And there's a reason sometimes campaigns are mostly the same at the core except for PROBLEM X WHICH MUST BE SOLVED NOW OR WE ALL DIE.
It will be very hard to draw the line between political messages and everything else. Many areas of the market are almost impossible to make non-political ads in (fossil fuels, health insurance, ...)
What are you talking about, most of the advertising in those industries has nothing to do with whatever their lobbyist are doing. It's just menial PR shit like "Save 20% at United Healthcare", or "Work on cutting-edge technology at BP", or "Monsanto now offers consulting services to help you optimize your crop gains". Maybe once in a while they flash some statistic about how diverse their workforce is or whatever but most of it is just generic commercialism.
It's only really in the valley that companies think listing opinions that significant percentages of the country disagree with is a good way to build marketshare.
I should say for some parts of business it seeems impossible to entirely avoid political messaging. If BP, Monsanto etc. make 100 ads, 90 of them will not be political. 1 will be actually political, but 10 of them will definitely be accused of being political. It will create a problem for those trying to draw a line.
What ads aren't political? At this point, when politicians are just reputation-laundering spokespersons for multinational financial interests, it makes no difference whether you advertise for the candidate or the product.
Perhaps this will disincentivize investment in electoral politics, but it won't rescue the public discourse from financiers' influence.
There is a third option here. Instead of a blanket ban, or selective enforcement of "fact checking," we could neuter the utility of online political ads by simply requiring similar disclosures to what you see on television and by limiting the ability of advertisers to target individuals. If advertisers could only target certain demographics (e.g. 18-35, 35-50, 50+) in larger regions (multiple zip codes, or even entire states), then the ads would be essentially equivalent to TV ads, which I would assume most people just completely ignore.
Otherwise you wind up in this super nebulous area where you have to either be an arbiter of the "truth" or what qualifies as a "political" advertisement.
Also, I would be in favor of an outright ban on all advertising until X days within the election, where X is < 60 days.
This makes sense.. though I'm not sure it will do much in practice to improve political discourse. The combination of politicians having twitter accounts and twitter's content recommendation engine promoting politician's tweets make me think the perceived effect to the end user (twitter showing people messages from politicians or their supporters) will remain more or less the same.
But because twitter isn't taking money directly from those politicians, it perhaps reduces their perceived culpability. It seems like a good move for twitter.
It will remove the direct influence on who the ad gets sent to at least, a tweet will spread organically to a much wider audience than a targeted ad so messages cannot be as micro-targeted.
Good point. Now if only we could ban micro-targetting in general. It's a corrosive force to society in a wide array of scenarios, not just political advertising. (For instance, it's been known to facilitate discrimination in real estate and the job market.)
I think for things like jobs, housing, etc that have protected civil rights the only real way to ensure people's rights aren't being infringed is to make them completely open and post both the ad and the stats of where the ad was served/the settings for the targeted audience depending on the type of . Maybe even need to directly test that the bidder isn't racially targeting with random test offers if it's a google style bot bidding system. A similar system is probably needed for political ads because one insidious fact of web targeted ads is there's much less chance to respond to and potentially debunk them if they're highly targeted. With radio and television ads you couldn't do that they'd go to everyone watching so more people outside the targeted demo would see.
In Norway political TV adds are banned, I wish it would apply to all media. The democracy works much better when you have to make a proper argument instead of just having the best ad.
I'd also like to ban political polling, it is used to push a narrative far too often instead of discussing the actual issue. Another issue is that parties will shape their positions according to polls and not what they actually think. Lastly, some people want to be on the "winning team" and will pick party based on who is in the lead.
I believe Jack's statement, while obviously well intended, is misleading.
Twitter will stop accepting money for political advertising. This is not the same as "stop(ping) all political advertising on Twitter".
Other people will continue promote things there and get paid for it regardless of what twitter's policy is.
I worry that a widespread misunderstanding of this will increase the public's vulnerability to paid manipulation on Twitter, particularly in a way that maximizes the impact of the least honest parties.
How do you implement it though? I live in Taiwan and constantly see ads from People’s Daily, which usually contains text sneakily promoting CCP propaganda. Do those ads count as political? I hope so, otherwise China would most definitely exploit this. But then do you also ban, say, FOX? The NYT?
I really like Twitter’s decision and the idea behind it. But I also worry this would end up toothless toward bad actors, and restrictive for those who want to act morally.
It makes me wonder if Zuckerberg has seriously considered doing this as well for Facebook. Considering he's been in congressional hearings twice, I'm sure the thought has crossed his mind once or twice. The money is too good, so he's likely willing to walk the tight-rope. I think Twitter is setting a good precedent here, whether other similar social media sites will follow suit is the question.
Call me a Scrooge but my read is rather that whoever wins will piss off the opposite side, who will blame social media like they did in 2016, and there is no scenario where twitter doesn't ends up the target of more regulations unless they stay away from the elections as far as they can.
This will not help with trolls and viral campaigns though.
This is a great point, but ducking out of politics is exactly the right move here to avoid that kind of charge.
Regulation will come with any functioning democracy. If an entity other than the State has too much power, Democracies will eventually dismantle or defang it, as they should.
This is nice that they aren't selling/boosting political ads (though apparently there's no solution for buying bot armies). However I feel that the root of the problem remains unaddressed- a small group of private companies with their own whims and interests is becoming the sole arbiter of speech and public discourse.
Perhaps it’s my own selection bias but why does it feel like everyone thinks this will righteously hurt republicans and be beneficial to democrats?
I feel like this is a major blow to democrats more than republicans as democrats have a larger audience on Twitter. Do democrats not think they too benefit from carpet bombing ads?
I guess that’s true in many ways. But I wonder how much is preaching to the choir across the board here as the dynamic is following people you mainly don’t know.
Meanwhile the ad spend can be reserved for networks full of more middle-of-the-road people. I guess that’s the big battle ground. And I wonder if republicans can direct more ad spend there now that Twitter is off limits. I guess I’m wondering if Twitter was a necessary drain on their resources they don’t have to worry about now?
Does USA have something like an election commision?
If a candidate or their representatives publish false information in the election season and any citizen complains about it, the election commision can try the candidate and perhaps even ban the candidate from participating in the elections.
Yes there is an election commission. The recent actions by certain Republican congress members have reduced the efficiency of said commission to zero. We also have to deal with some important Supreme Court rulings: 1) Politicians can lie during campaigns, 2) Unlimited Super PAC funding of candidates, and 3) Coporations have the same rights as individuals
> If a candidate or their representatives publish false information in the election season /.../ perhaps even ban the candidate from participating in the elections.
So we'd have elections with no candidates at all. Or, more realistically, we'd have ones that have opinions matching opinions of those people who sit on the commission. Nice system, though it's not clear why bother with elections then at all - we just let the commission - after all, people who know all the truth must know how to select good people who tell the truth? - to choose suitable candidates. Elections where candidates that the commission doesn't like are excluded are no elections anyway - you can look at Russia how it works, they have "elections" exactly like that - people not approved by Kremlin largely just are excluded from participation, so nobody can vote for them.
I just realized that the USA does not have civil services. Like your elected officials can appoint random people for random things.
Anyway, a good election commision can be formed by pooling career civil servants, equal representatives from each political party, a bench of retired judges elected by the Senate for a unit time.
The commision can not make any policy decision. All they can do is ensure that the elections happen in a clean way. Also banning is one of the extreme decisions, but if they do ban the candidate, the party has to provide someone else to contest.
A democracy where all candidates are liars is no better than Russian democracy where there are no candidates
> A democracy where all candidates are liars is no better than Russian democracy where there are no candidates
In every democracy "all candidates are liars", if you call a liar anybody whose views can be contradicted by somebody else. Most of what candidates talk about aren't scientific facts, they are opinions and projections and moral judgements. Even about scientific facts there is considerable disagreement - what was considered a healthy diet a decade ago, is seen as a nutritional disaster now, so would a candidate that advocates old diet be called a liar? What about advocating current one - would such a candidate be a liar in a couple of years? Some economists think rent control and minimal wage are a disaster, others think they are a very reasonable and beneficial measures. If a politician agrees with some of them but not others - is she a liar? There's not a lot in what politicians say that can be scientifically and robustly verified as true or false - and those things that really can are largely inconsequential - even if some politician decides to proclaim pi equals 4, it's unlikely any actual policy would be influenced by that. So it would devolve into partisan bickering and gotcha hunting. Which you can amply witness on multitude of "factchecking" sites, which devolved very quickly from objective observers into presenting opinions as facts on one side into "factchecking" internet memes and obvious marked satire on the other.
This will fail the same way "real name" policies fail. Someone has to draw a line on what politics (or a real name) is for the purpose of the policy, and that's going to cut off a lot of useful ads.
For example: An ad for free HIV screening services is political by certain perspectives.
I'd love it if Dorsey did this for the right reasons (and applaud the effort regardless), but seems far more likely that this netted out as a bigger publicity win.
A policy of "there are no Twitter rules for politicians, just don't make us a direct accessory to it" is disingenuous at best.
This is a cop out solution. We don't want to be a part of this debate and neither have the capital to be - so we will just not show any political ads. Social media is just like television in some ways - it is a channel for users/businesses to magnify their voice via ads.
For everyone asking why Twitter or Facebook should treat ads differently to TV. There are some huge differences between the economics of the platforms that I haven't seen anyone mention.
Each TV station has a limited number of ad-seconds they can allocate per day. Because ad-seconds are scarce, prices are expensive, so you get a small number of expensive ads.
OTOH, Facebook can support a practically unlimited number of ads, shown to different users, changing as people scroll.
It is _much_ easier to fact-check or apply human judgement to a small number of TV ads than to millions of social media ads.
Disclaimer: I don't work in the ad industry, I know nothing about this. I just haven't seen anyone talk about the difference in scale here.
I've advertised on twitter, and you can either promote tweets or promote your account. When you promote an account, it raises the visibility of the account, its description, and recent tweets (which people end up seeing when they consider following you or learning more about you).
So promoting an account can have the same effect as promoting a tweet, though perhaps at a higher cost (because it's a less efficient way of promoting a tweet). If political advertisers end up doing this, twitter may profit from their policy shift, but without actually achieving the putative goal.
Please, can we all stop saying “but what’s a political ad?”
Surely HN commentators are smart enough to try to answer their question before posting it. Well, did political ads exist before social media? How does that work? Etc etc.
Jack's "earned not bought" effectively means that Twitter's opaque & self-serving algorithms, rather than explicitly disclosed prices & targeting, will control what political messages get "reach" on Twitter.
Twitter's bullhorn will thus only be available to those people and messages that Twitter likes.
Those messages that Twitter doesn't like will be algorithmically confined to a unlighted cellar, for display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
I support the banning of political ads on any platform that can be subject to manipulation an or have thousands of bots then go to work to support a side (not real people). Political ads are nothing more than money in politics. Make politicians spend that money instead on traveling to towns and having town halls, greeting people on the streets, businesses, and in as much in person instead. Have them earn it, not just sit back and have some marketing person create ads for them.
I commend Jack Dorsey for his ethics. I think there could have been a better solution though - why not just disallow targeting on political ads? Only allow coarse-grained targeting, say at a state level. You still give political campaigns the opportunity to leverage the network and spread the word, and you get at least part of the revenue.
The problem with social media advertising is the targeted nature of ads. If you take that out, and place ads like DuckDuckGo does, it is not that different from newspaper ads and much less dangerous.
They need to be transparent then with how they prioritize organic content. They've replaced a transparent system (advertising) with an opaque one (organic feed) and that has consequences.
For this to work, they need to start immediately with an incredibly conservative policy, akin to the presumption of innocence in the justice system. An ad should be presumed political unless it can be shown, through a series of positive affirmations with the burden of proof on the ad-maker, that it isn’t. Avoid the slippery slope by saying that some non-political ads will be banned to ensure all political ads are. For unpaid speech regulation this would be an insane standard, but for paid speech it’s a just one.
If only spinning up bots was considered as part of political advertising.
I don't think political ads were ever really a problem on Twitter. The crux of Twitter's problems are what I like to call virtual populism (i.e. bot armies retweeting propaganda and fake news).
With virtual populism, the illusion of an organic movement is created and this illusion eventually draws in real humans (after all, bots don't vote).
It's hard to imagine what this gesture is meant to solve. Political ads are far more innocuous that the everyday posts of its users, which divide, cement and sway people's opinions and thoughts much more forcefully. I'm not saying ban those, but just saying you're not going to run ads, when that's the least of any problem's solution, is kind of superficial.
Seems like the right move. Personally, I think we are reaching the edges of what we can reasonably expect from social media companies. If a politician is lying in their ads, is it up to a social media company to decide the truth or well informed citizens to decide fact from fiction? In some cases the easiest way to win is not to play. Hope Zuck gets the message.
Suppose we applied a basic test to a potential ad: does it sell a product or a service? If yes, you can buy ad space for it. If it's "selling" a concept, idea, way of life, promotes a group, organization etc (basically, NOT selling a service or a product), it's deemed political and cannot be aired.
Would that work?
> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ;)”
I can't agree enough with this. Very well put, and I think we all know who the winky smile refers to.
This can be very bad globally. In countries with totalitarian regimes like Russia advertising on Twitter was one of few ways to reach politically active audience in order to make people go and vote. It's literally impossible to buy political advertising anywhere since government will put pressure on anyone who make business with opposition.
Perfect timing! Just as the UK election campaign kicks off, they ban advertising for it so we can hopefully finally see a partial reduction to the lazy journalism of "reporting" on how people are reacting to Party X's ads on twitter.
Journalists and politicians seem to put a lot more emphasis on twitter than most people seem to care about.
I look at the analytics for one of my Tweets and at the bottom it says: "Reach a bigger audience. Get more engagements by promoting this Tweet!"
...or what Jack said: paying to increase reach.
I think I always thought that Twitter ads were these magical separate entities, when really, they seem to be normal Tweets that are just paid to be more popular.
"We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too." - Jack Dorsey
Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde tweeted a reply to someone who asked this question:
“hi - here's our current definition:
1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or
2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)”
Smart move from Twitter. By removing the speech of people they disagree with under the guise of vague and selective ToS enforcement, they're still able to push their own political agenda, while removing the recourse that political advertising would allow.
This move will increase scrutiny on the ICYMI algorithm. Does it pick up tweets on one side of the aisle more than the other? Do people know how the algorithm works, and can they game it to increase distribution of their political tweets?
Given the pretty terrible experience that all social networks are on mobile, this should make Twitter slightly less awful. With the election coming up in the UK I can’t imagine Facebook being remotely usable for the next few months.
I think this is an excellent move for twitter. The problem now will be determining what is a "political ad" which I'd imagine has a lot of edge cases but if they can do it I think this will be a huge win for them.
ads are nothing but propaganda, someone trying to sell something it could be good or bad.
I see twitter where there are fake profiles and their posts. twitter allows anyone to register with a fake email using services like mailinator and continue spreading lies. They should be banned.
I think ads are okay as we have been manipulated by ads via media newspaper etc. no one questions them, what about the news reporter who is biased and writes news like the ads. Atleast the ads we know are ads and sane person can determine based on history that ads are not truth.
Kudos to Jack for this step. it will put pressure on FB to act responsibly. however Now the debate will shift to what is a political ad. its like superpac and political party symbiosis again
This is huge and amazing move. I am a big fan of Twitter and @jack and love their backing of Bitcoin. I love it when the right thing to do is also the financially smart thing to do.
They should also ban group of people that spam as advertiser.
Most of time they works in the same room and are paid by the politician party to spread the word about the polyworm!
Bots don't have a citizenship ("chinese", "russian"), they merely push the agenda of the person/persons who have paid the most, no? Are there not many hijacked computers, routers, devices inside the USA and many other countries which are one of the most important parts of the bot networks to evade detection?
I wonder if now that political advertising is banned on twitter if the illegal / immoral bot and human armies of agenda pushers will have a larger advantage than before now that those who follow the rules have lost their outlet of spreading their message with their donors money beyond their own profiles and their existing followers?
Final policy 11/15, enforcement starts 11/22. This seems like a tricky line to walk. For example, could I promote a Tweet about the UBI without mentioning Andrew Yang?
When did paid political ads become such a big issue? I was under the impression it was all the bots and organized trolls that Twitter and Facebook were taking heat for.
Smart. The revenue is hardly worth getting regularly dragged in front of Congress. Best to leave influence over the political discourse to the Internet Research Agency.
I'm seeing a lot of discussion relating to US laws, but this tweet says the decision is globally applicable. How are the US laws relevant to the decision?
i guess the stock market shorts weren't wrong after all. $twtr is looking pretty bleak right about now.
otherwise, like all good deeds, this will mainly affect smaller parties that don't have enough funds or traction. big ones will continue to advertise via established (i.e. more expensive) routes.
I know this is about people paying for posts with money, but if one zooms out a bit to think about this -- any user of a platform like Twitter is paying/spending time (aka paying in their time and attention). IMO, trying to police and stop people from spreading their ideas online (political or otherwise) is a fools errand, and the antithesis of how social networks function.
I'm starting to see Twitter and Facebook more like the newspapers, and really, more like the delivery service. Perhaps I could print anything in a newspaper, which I can't, but even if I could, someone would have to deliver that newspaper to the doorsteps of people for them to read it or they would have to go try to find a copy in the store. These platforms already have delivery routes determined through algorithms, already choosing who receives which newspapers.
What role do you think these networks should play in distributing these posts to our door?
Well that is a similar line of reasoning that has been applied to ISPs that deliver internet itself, and I think music publishers took that line when suing ISPs for facilitating piracy. I think all forums and UGC platforms deal with this in their own way. (like Reddit, they mostly let each subreddit have their own mods that decide what content and topics they want to allow.) In Twitter's case, I am skeptical of the end game with their current approach, where the loudest in the room tends to stand out.
There's really no reason to run political ads on Twitter, and I doubt Twitter would have made this decision if it actually hurt them financially in any meaningful way. Politics on Twitter is quite simple, say something and get your crowd to retweet it. AOC and Trump are the masters of this, they get a lot of political messages/lies/misleading messages out, and they don't spend a dime on it. Facebook is a different animal altogether in terms of politics.
Campaign finance is illegal in most of the first world. If political ads were banned in the US, politicians wouldn't need money to get reelected (Ads get the majority of votes.). When a politician needs money to get reelected they have to take money from lobbyists.
Banning political ads is crucial linchpin to getting money out of politics.
There was a campaign finance law in 1971 that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Buckley v. Valeo, the US Supreme Court ruled that campaign finance laws are freedom of speech, in that without such laws, the every day person is restricted from being heard when the wealthy are allowed to use money beyond what the common person can pay. Because of this, the court upheld limits on contributions to candidates ruling campaign finance is legal, as long as it is limited to an amount everyone can participate in.
From the Supreme Court: "The Court affirmed a First Amendment interest in spending money to facilitate campaign speech, writing, "A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached." Further, the law's "$1,000 ceiling on spending 'relative to a clearly identified candidate,' would appear to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most effective modes of communication."
The Court upheld limits on contributions to candidates.
edit: In 2002 there was another campaign finance law that went to the Supreme Court, again for freedom of speech. In McConnell v. FEC, the court ruled, "the need to control corruption overshadowes any minor threat to free speech".
Neither of those have to do with someone putting $500 down to run a political ad on Facebook. Local politicians, mayors, etc run political ads. Good luck policing all of that. If you block an individual from spending $500 on Facebook ads because of some law, you are violating that person's freedom of speech. That is entirely separate from campaign finance. Why stop there? Why not limit what Newspapers can say? They often get stories about politicians wrong, sometimes even in an effort to sway public opinion.
counter argument: having something explicitly labeled as "advertisement" allows for people to take it into context. now that that route has been taken away, advertisers would pursuit native marketing, even more subversive.
I see a lot of calls here for facebook to follow suit. I run a facebook advertising agency and use their tools every day (including the political advertising tools) and would like to offer some perspective on the potential nuances here.
When I run an ad on facebook, if the ad contains "issues of national importance" that ad is subject to the same rules as political advertising. From facebook, this includes any ads on the following topics:
-civil and social rights
-crime
-economy
-education
-environmental politics
-guns
-health
-immigration
-political values and governance
-security and foreign policy
Some examples of ads that I have run and had personal experience with that would then be banned if facebook enacted a similar ban:
-Ads for any non-profit or charity dealing with the environment. This would include ads raising money to combat de-forestation in the amazon, setting up marine sanctuaries, or ads about drilling rights in the arctic (all ads I have seen recently or worked on creating)
-Any ads about women's rights or reproductive rights. This includes any ad for planned parenthood, or similar organizations. Also includes ads for charities that raise money to support women's rights in other countries.
-Ads for charities raising money to support refugees in Greece. In fact, every ad for every charity that does basically anything would be banned. These charities deal with issues that are inherently political: the environment, reproductive rights, human rights...the list goes on.
So if facebook banned all this advertising on it's platform, what were going to end up with is a situation where the internet (for all intents and purposes, for millions of people "the internet" is essentially facebook) is a place totally devoid of anything that is not a strictly commercial enterprise. Selling T-shirts is ok, raising money for charity is not OK. Maybe this is the boundary we want to collectively set.
Also, saying that this is only for paid reach specifically is not really fair. Paid reach is the only kind of reach that actually exists for all intents and purposes on these platforms. It's a pay to play market.
If you ban all political ads, you are also banning anyone from advertising anything that deals with "issues of national importance" and this will hit charities (and anyone with a message that is not strictly commercial) particularly hard.
We work with personalities who want to sell T-shirts with political messages on them, for example. Those will now be banned. We work with a yoga studio that wants to highlight their commitment to full time employment for their employees. Those ads would be banned. We work with an author who writes about abortion. Ads for her book would be banned.
Is this the kind of platform we want facebook to be? Like it or not, facebook is how millions of people engage with the world. I don't want to live in a society that is so afraid of political speech that we have to ban everything that might hurt us. Let us decide for ourselves what to believe. Are some lies going to get through? Yeah they will. But that's the consequence of allowing more "free speech" on a platform. Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want. They have no obligation to uphold free speech. Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg understands that banning these things sets a dangerous precedent, and I only hope that he is able to defend his decisions and explain his reasoning.
Because the alternative to allowing some lies to get through in ads is much much worse.
One can only wonder if this policy would take place if these ads helped democrats in getting the office in the last election.
I would say definitely not. It's silicon valley and this company's left-leaning CEO.
Does this not give an advantage to people like Trump, who have a large following and media attention, thus letting them still "advertise" via their own tweets? Couldn't people with large followings take money to tweet on behalf of others?
Twitter makes more from "free ads" than paid ads, and they just want an out. The out is "we aren't making money from political ads!". When you go check Trump's latest tweet (which can be full of lies) or Uncle Buck's retweet (which can be full of lies) you are also viewing ads.
Twitter stand is simply: we won't make money directly from political ads because 1 - we don't make money there anyway, and 2 - this is good PR. However we will make all the money we can off ads tied to the free for all of russian bot posts, AOC posts, Trump posts, and Uncle Buck retweets.
Anyone who thinks Jack Dorsey cares at all about democracy vs profits has blinders on.
I help run a digital political agency (with partner(s)). Still thinking through this but a few initial reactions that might provide a different perspective:
- I haven't found a lot of utility in Twitter outside of reaching really specific insiders/decision makers. In terms of direct response FB is far superior and FB also wins with targeting, reach, and the persuasion/recall studies we've done as well. That is to say TW doesn't get much if any of our client's budget. Seems some larger 'brand name' candidates get better direct response. Point is it's a small fraction of our digital spend, and I would guess far less than .5% of twitter's ad revenue.
- what about paid 'influencer' or social marketing ads? e.g. I pay person XX to post organically. Or the much larger problem of bots/fake/gamed content.
- TW seems to be (I can't quantify though maybe others can) to be either totally inept at reducing fake/gamed content at worst complicit because they need the growth from fake numbers. This seems like it has much larger impact than paid political advertising and should be the first thing to get serious about. This seems like if the goal is to lose weight cutting your nails probably isn't the first thing to do.
- I had a strong reaction reading Dorsey's tech points saying ML, micro-targeting are 'powerful and very effective for __ advertisers.' But to me it seems odd to make a differentiation that it's ok to use these 'extremely effective' tools to profitably 'target and force people to see their __ ad' while blocking political speech (to help this point I left political/commercial blank, try flipping them). TW will happily 'force people to see' ads for alcohol, sugar companies, etc and the point is it works, whether selling a politician or product or Disney if the tech is dangerous for politics why isn't dangerous for commerce (or where is the line in dangerous commerce)? IDK I think I have a different perspective on the fundamental importance of political speech than this group. But this seems like an odd argument to me. To that point of drawing political lines, what about a company advertising to sell copies of a racist book on replacement theory, which has been shown to correlate with recent rise of dangerous white nationalism (mass shooters buy the book) and externalities like electing Trump?
"Bots" are such a boogeyman on Twitter, usually from older folks that just don't understand the nature of the internet. I've seen threads where completely legitimate people are accused of being "bots." If the problem were so extreme, it would be much more pronounced. It's incredibly hard to police, and it happens on every single platform.
Every time I see someone complaining about bots, its because there are a lot of likes for something they personally dislike. Not saying bots on the internet are not a problem, but I think lots of people are quick to blame bots instead of conceding that others may disagree with them. Its also virtually impossible to prove accounts as "real" or "bots" without some ID verification in place. People kinda do it via clustering/graph analysis, but I think even those are iffy at best.
Free speech is not a minority only issue, and just about all expression is political to someone. As a heads up, there is no need to educate me on free speech expectations as they pertain to private entities versus the state, it is still reprehensible to me that people accustomed to living in a free society advocate for this kind wide-scale silencing of views they disagree with.
>it is still reprehensible to me that people accustomed to living in a free society advocate for this kind wide-scale silencing of views they disagree with.
Twitter surfaces tweets from people you're not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot's tweet.
I think this kind of response muddies the issue. Refusing political ads by political parties or promoting political parties is a clean way to define things, and it sounds like this is what Twitter has done.
You can argue that any other advertising is still political (e.g. retail ads promoting a ‘capitalist agenda’).
I recently started running ads for a company I own. I'll keep it vague but, the company is just a SaaS for tracking legislation in a certain interesting way.
Annoyingly, Facebook decided that I was advertising Political content, and therefor requires a whole series of additional verification steps, as well as a disclaimer of the fashion "Payed for By _______" right beneath my ad.
Needless to say, it gives my advertisement a feel which I don't think it should have. It's not a political advertisement. Nor is it about a political, or social issue. Nor does it promote anything - campaign, legislation, or otherwise.
It's an ad, for an app, that provides access to data in a totally unbiased (and unaltered) way.
TLDR; These companies are casting a really wide net in the wake of the election ads scandal. Unfortunately, some people are getting targeted who (IMO) shouldn't be and there's ZERO recourse. No phone number to call, no rep I can explain things to, nothing. I appealed the decision and it was - no joke - instantly denied. If twitter is anything like Facebook, this means I can no longer advertise my app on twitter. Lame.
But Twitter and most of social media's employees are overwhelming Democrat. Google's Public fillings show 87% donated to the Democratic party, and no one in top leadership donated to the Republicans.
This is such a bogus move, because Twitter knows Trump has out-raised opponents by leaps and bounds, and the only way to cut his message is to stop all political adverts.
Remember, Twitter actively engages in censorship that overtly leans left, so much so that over the past 10 years, PEW research has found a massive, unmistakable tilt to the left in Twitter membership, which was close to 50-50 not too long ago.
So only pro-consumerism political ads are allowed now.
So Toyota can buy ads to promote their gas burning cars, but I can't buy ads to encourage people to stop burning up the environment.
Only profit-seekers can buy mindshare.
This whole debate is absurd.
Trump rose to the White House on $1B worth of unpaid media exposure by being an outrageous personality. How is that better for democracy than paid ads?
You can't really criticise twitter for this - last year they were all ready to launch a way to embed text posts in a tweet like images can currently be embedded in a tweet, until the userbase revolted and they had to cancel the plan.
Really? The twitter userbase actually prefers it this way? That's baffling to me. Did the revolting userbase provide any reasons or explanations for this preference?
I'm not a Twitter user myself, but the character limit is what made Twitter unique. It might be fun to laugh at people who only want to read 140 characters, but we shouldn't assume they aren't going elsewhere to post and read essays. A lot of people use Twitter and reddit/Facebook/HN/ect.
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”
We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.
We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
>While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics,
It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...
Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.
> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ;)”
That would make sense if it were numbers for my tweets. I don't get any dopamine hit from seeing that Jack Dorsey is getting another thousand retweets every three seconds. It just makes me give up on reading and close the tab.
Very. How do you enforce it and what defines a political ad? Who gets to be the judge, jury and enforcer? A contract Twitter employee making less than $20/hour in a low-tax country like Ireland?
This is just a pretext for Twitter to allow left wing political ads and ban right wing political ads. Twitter is incapable of holding itself to any kind of objective standard.
Beyond spineless of Jack and everyone at Twitter. Political ads seem to work just fine on TV, radio, print, and everywhere else on the web. Pathetic that Twitter decided to bow down to the most paranoid in our society. All he is doing is validating these stupid conspiracy theories and cementing how scary it is that he has so much control on freedom of expression in modern society.
I will bet anything that Twitter allows political ads for the 2024 election with Trump gone.
in 95% of cases it's a trivial decision, in particular if you want to stop the most egregious offenders. It's like the infamous line about porn, you know it when you see it.
On edge cases time will work out standards, that's what these companies ought to employ humans for.
Because Facebook wants those ads. They productize the ability to run them, and it's revenue they want. They lie about or disguise their participation in the market and their policies policing that content. Facebook continues to take steps to get more of that revenue. It's not "hard", it's just just they don't want to do it.
I'm not sure that's it. Twitter was going to be sued if they allowed one party to advertise but not the other. This decision allows them to still behave with some partisanship via their moderation policy.
Facebook is taking the safer position in this case, IMO, from a legal/regulatory perspective. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
There's some pretty misleading TV ads out there, especially in more purple (contentious) districts. Senate race in Arizona, for example have been brutal, and abstracted by PACs.
There are a lot of baltantly false ads on TV, and have been for decades.
Remember "this is your brain on drugs"? Or how about the "drugs fund terrorism" super bowl ads? That was a blatantly false campaign designed primarily not to discourage drug use, but to make it difficult for mainstream organizations and their people from supporting drug policy reform.
Isn't every Volkswagen ad which touted fuel economy in their diesel vehicles essentially a blatantly false ad on the issue of climate change and carbon use?
Many pharmaceutical ads have some blatantly false messaging, whether overt or not, and all of them carry the same political message: that the current system of regulation and intellectual property around drugs is healthy for people.
TV is overrun by blatantly false ads that, once you think about it, have an unambiguously political component.
A tv channel has like 6 to 9 slots per 30 minutes of content and most of those slots have the same ads playing multiple times in a day. I would guess that there’s at most 1-2 hours of unique ad content for one channel per week to review.
With user generated content and thousands of unique ad slots, using humans to verify is prohibitive.
Would a pro-life advert, which has obvious political ramifications depending on which side of the divide you are on, qualify as a political ad? I ask because Twitter has actively been blocking/stopping pro-life organizations from running ads with zero transparency on how the decision was arrived at or which policy it violates, but doesn't apply the same standard to pro-choice groups and in fact gives them carte blanche to continue running ads. Twitter has clearly shown its bias on multiple occasions and I don't expect this to change in the short or long term.
here's our current definition:
1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or
2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)
This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.