
Facebook reverses on paid influencers after Bloomberg memes - ajaviaad
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-facebook-paid-political-messages-ads.html
======
m_ke
It's crazy to me that we allow politicians to run targeted ad campaigns.

I randomly looked up Andrew Yang on good a few days ago on my phone and had
ads from two billionaires take up my whole screen.

[https://imgur.com/a/Ke3aWBH](https://imgur.com/a/Ke3aWBH)

Without campaign finance regulation majority of the billions donated to
campaigns is going directly into pockets of Google, Facebook and cable
monopolies. We're letting billionaires buy the election.

> What has Bloomberg been spending on? Per the Federal Elections Commission
> data through the end of 2019, the two biggest costs have been television
> advertising ($132 million) and digital outreach ($20 million). Some of the
> costs reflect a late entry to the campaign—buying lists of voters to contact
> ($3.2 million), hiring people to gather signatures to get his name on the
> ballot ($373,441), and hiring recruiters to bring onboard staff ($107,000).

[https://qz.com/1802367/detailing-mike-bloombergs-
unprecedent...](https://qz.com/1802367/detailing-mike-bloombergs-
unprecedented-2020-campaign-spending/)

How are we supposed to trust the media when they're on track to get a billion
dollars from a single candidate?

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
A first big step would be to severely limit campaign spending on
advertisement, including SuperPAC money. If you mention your candidate's name,
that ad will count towards a hard cap on ad spending.

~~~
MR4D
The problem is that you can't have that and also have the first Amendment. Of
all speech to be protected, the _most important speech_ is political speech.

But aside from that, what happens if my spouse runs and ad naming my opponent?

Or my neighbor does?

Or CNN does - perhaps in an ad for a personal interview to be televised in
prime time ?

There is no _practical_ way to stop this. There will always be ways around it.

But first, that Amendment thing...

If you lock down political speech, you no longer have a democracy (yes, I know
we are a republic). Because then the government gets to control what is or is
not allowed. And I guarantee that whichever party is in power at the moment
will use that to try to stay in power. And it's dominoes falling after that.

~~~
Seenso
> If you lock down political speech, you no longer have a democracy (yes, I
> know we are a republic). Because then the government gets to control what is
> or is not allowed.

Political speech is already locked down in many ways by the government. For
instance: neither you nor I can go to a polling station and harangue the
people waiting to vote. We're also not permitted to force our way into schools
or private homes to do the same. If we violate those rules, some people in
blue uniforms will come and haul us away.

No one has an unrestricted right to go out and _literally speak_ , as that
right to do that is balanced against other rights and considerations. What's
so different about the right to _spend_? Why can't that right be balanced
against other rights and considerations, too?

~~~
tathougies
> We're also not permitted to force our way into schools or private homes to
> do the same

Actually, you are allowed to protest on public property within earshot of
private homes.

You cannot enter a private home because someone else's property and liberty
trump your right to free speech on their property. In so far as their property
includes the sidewalk (typically). You have every right to speak there. You
can even protest there if you want.

> No one has an unrestricted right to go out and literally speak,

Yes, you do have every right to go out on public property and literally speak.
That is literally the right you have that many have died for and the ACLU and
other orgs have fought for. Try it right now! Have fun. There is literally no
restriction as long as you are not physically harassing or verbally abusing
someone, and you are not physically preventing anyone from passing you.

~~~
Seenso
>> No one has an unrestricted right to go out and literally speak...

> Yes, you do have every right to go out on public property and literally
> speak.

No, you don't. Most states have laws that prevent you from doing that at a
polling place on election day:

For example:

[https://www.nass.org/sites/default/files/surveys/2020-01/sta...](https://www.nass.org/sites/default/files/surveys/2020-01/state-
laws-polling-place-electioneering-Jan2020.pdf)

> During the hours the polls are open, a person who is in the polling place or
> within 200 feet of any entrance to the polling place may not attempt to
> persuade a person to vote for or against a candidate, proposition, or
> question.

~~~
tathougies
These all have distance limitations meant to allow people to access the
facility. Outside of those places on public property, you have every right.

This is like saying laws meant to keep stairways clear are restricting your
free speech. You are absolutely allowed to protest near an election center
within reasonable limits.

To point out how ridiculous these selections of laws are as a proof that free
speech is being abridged, I'll point out that Alabama restricts protests to be
at least _30 feet_ away from the site. If 30 feet means you can't get your
message across in a public enough forum, I'm not sure what to say.

Also, a lot of those laws are subject to pending legislation.

~~~
sjy
Sounds like you are in complete agreement with the original claim that “no one
has an unrestricted right to go out and literally speak.”

------
gambler
It was _blatantly obvious_ that social networks are ideal tools for corporate
and political propaganda. It was obvious from the very beginning, where people
sung praises to Web 2.0 and "collective intelligence". Moreover, real
technologists wrote about it, extensively, at the time:

[https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-
maois...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maoism-the-
hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism)

If some "technologist" acts surprised by this turn of events now, I see only
two possibilities:

1\. They are genuine, but absolutely suck at analyzing how technology actually
works in society.

2\. They are liars who knew the dangers of such systems, but didn't find them
objectionable because it suited their goals at the time.

What seriously disturbs me is that almost everyone from academia or big tech
who engage in public discourse on this issue right now - almost all of them
_do_ act surprised.

~~~
vertig0h
Of course the answer is #2. When Obama ran in 2008 and 2012, media, academics
and technologists fawned over his campaign's then novel use of technology and
Facebook advertising.

I remember clear as day reading articles and analysis about his campaign
methods without noting a single hint of concern or animus.

I've lost a significant amount of faith in people's integrity since 2016 not
because of Trump, but because of people's responses to Trump.

~~~
Phanyxx
Very good point. Social media platforms were held up a shining example because
Obama's message was largely positive, but few stopped to think about the flip
side of the scenario... until 2016.

~~~
vertig0h
"positive"

That's subjective. Something that sounds nice and upliftung may not actually
be positive in the long run while something that sounds negative may indeed be
necessary.

Which proves the point that opposition to online political advertising is not
rooted in some deep and profound moral principle, but is merely a response to
one's favored "side" being outmaneuvered by opposition candidates' deft use of
online tools and advertising.

Moral shallowness is masquerading as righteousness on the Left, but many have
convinced themselves that the masquerade is genuine.

~~~
Joe-Z
Greed and hubris is masquerading as reason and „telling it like it is“ on the
Right but many have convinced themselves that the masquerade is genuine.

Just doing some balancing here.

~~~
vertig0h
I don't disagree with you.

------
ryanschneider
I was personally a fan of Yang’s platform position where every citizen
received an annual $100 credit that could be transferred to candidates.
Instead of trying to restrict what can and can’t be said, give the citizens
enough aggregate buying power to over shadow the lobbyists.

[https://www.yang2020.com/policies/democracydollars/](https://www.yang2020.com/policies/democracydollars/)

~~~
w-ll
Isn't this like voting, but with more steps?

~~~
tfehring
Money is more fungible than votes. If you live in a very red or very blue
state, it's probably more impactful to buy $100 worth of political advertising
for your candidate of choice in swing states than it is to actually vote in a
nationwide general election. (For what it's worth, I'd bet this is still true
if you replace $100 with $1.)

------
dpix
Why is it that paying influencers to push agendas (business or political) not
considered advertising. I can understand that facebook shouldn't be held
accountable for legitimacy of this type of advertising but if an instagram or
facebook account has a large enough following they should be treated as
advertisers themselves and scrutinized accordingly

~~~
zaroth
The issue is not about restricting people from making a political statement,
or even restricting people from being paid to make a political statement.

But if you are being paid to make an advertising or political statement, you
should be required to disclose that you were paid to make the statement.

Not surprisingly, we already have laws which require this for advertisements
through FTC regulation. The FEC is working on something similar for political
ads, and there's even a bipartisan bill from Klobuchar and Graham no less;

> _Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced the
> 2019 Honest Ads Act, which would mandate disclosure of those paying for
> online political ads and create a publicly available database of political
> ads that appear on major online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon,
> Snapchat and Twitter._

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-
bill/135...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-
bill/1356/text)

------
AndrewKemendo
Advertising is absolutely a malignant tumor on society. It's unstoppable and
impossible to know where it's going to show up and how.

Legitimately creative geniuses will find every possible way to try and
influence you to buy their thing or vote for their person, and I really don't
know if it's possible to stop it.

------
pier25
What's the difference between a 'paid message' and an 'ad'?

~~~
penagwin
I'd say an "advertisement" is a form of a "paid message". For example I can
pay Facebook to put "I LOVE PENGUINS" on everyone's screen - it's not
technically an advertisement, just a statement or message.

But yeah in the case of political campaigns they're effectively the same thing
IMO.

------
appleflaxen
It's increasingly clear that Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp are
applications that every technologist should shun, and advocate against in
their personal lives and in their workplace based on the actions of the
corporation that owns them.

~~~
starpilot
But I have friends who work at those companies. They're brilliant, they post
here on HN, and have families that they take care of. They are active in their
local communities. Are you saying they're the bad guys? Should I distance
myself from them?

~~~
mft_
Was everyone in history who ended up doing something bad, or working for a bad
organisation, fundamentally evil in some way? Of course not: good people can
wind up in bad places.

And (while I’m not necessarily saying that Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp
are fundamentally bad) the way history might judge people (such as your
friends) would be in their response to finding themselves working at companies
which could be considered morally dubious.

~~~
starpilot
Yann Lecun?

------
krn
> Facebook said it is asking the influencer accounts that posted the Bloomberg
> memes to retroactively use the tool meant for such posts. After this
> happens, the posts will be labeled as a "paid partnership" with Bloomberg.

> Campaigns that avoid using the tool, as Bloomberg had, risk having their
> accounts suspended.

I don't see how this is a bad thing. Facebook made the right decision here.

~~~
takeda
The thing is that they only make the "right decision" when it benefit one
party, those things aren't issues for them when it benefits the other side.

------
djrogers
Very misleading headline - they _are_ allowing ads, they're just not ads that
Facebook is being paid for. An Instagram influencer being paid to say
something nice about a politician is an ad - full stop.

------
jshowa3
Anyone who has done a social media ad for Bloomberg has some serious integrity
issues to sort out.

~~~
giarc
Please explain? Facebook has said politicians can run ads that are false, I'm
not sure why paying influencers is all of a sudden a problem.

~~~
jshowa3
There's a lot of problems. You may be advertising for a candidate you don't
support just for the money. Most of the advertising has nothing to do with
policy positions. The money paid isn't disclosed. It manipulates people easily
because it's fad chasing and the candidate often isn't even in it. It promotes
rampant consumerism, validation, and group pressure. Then again, there's a big
problem with Facebook in general. But that's a whole other can of worms.

~~~
cortesoft
Do you feel that all the people who work at Facebook have the same integrity
problem? Anyone who works for a company that either makes money from or
provides services to companies who make money from advertising?

~~~
jshowa3
I believe it is some of the people that work there not all obviously, but it's
mostly the system that's the problem. Ads nowadays are specifically designed
to track you and harvest personal data about you at zero expense to you. They
are often deceptive in that they advertise a product always as a cure all for
everything and they use proven psychologically manipulative tactics to get you
to buy the product instead of demonstrating what the product can do.
Obviously, Facebook has skin in the game to keep this system going. Which is
why they're doing a poor job of fact checking ads and would rather not do them
at all.

------
gowld
Interesting case. Is Facebook or any platform expected to be the police of all
their users' private contracts? That the legitimacy of content is based on how
profitable is for the poster and who paid them?

~~~
kraig
setting a policy and policing that policy are very different things, this
argument assumes that their users will deliberately break their advertising
rules

------
ajoy
We have build a chrome extension that block political ads on facebook
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-factual-
news-e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-factual-news-
evaluato/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp)). The extension also rates
credibility of news articles you read.

Facebook should stop allowing micro-targeting for political ads. Period.

~~~
firethief
> The extension also rates credibility of news articles you read.

So we can just meta-trust "The Factual" (and its what, neural net?) to tell us
what's true? I don't see anything about transparency on the website. Granting
that you have the best intentions to begin with, isn't that a _massive_ moral
hazard once you get popular?

~~~
ajoy
[https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html](https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html)
We try to be transparent. You should form your own opinion. We provide a tool.
Use this tool as just another data pt.

Posting here so people don't have to click away:

* Why should I trust The Factual Credibility grade for articles?

The Factual automatically calculates the probability that an individual
article is credible. This is based on four factors:

\- The diversity and quality of its sources

\- The factual tone of the article's writing style

\- The expertise of the journalist on the topic based on their article history

\- The site reputation based on historical scores of every article on the site

Because the calculation is automated and devoid of human involvement, criteria
are consistently applied across articles and sources.

Also, because grades are specific to an article and not a publication, scores
vary within a publication.

Our algo/tech can tell if something is good, rather than saying if something
is surely bad. Check out our news site that we built using our rating system,
if you have time:
[https://www.thefactual.com/news](https://www.thefactual.com/news)

More relevant to the thread :
[https://story.thefactual.com/news/story/229376-Mike-
Bloomber...](https://story.thefactual.com/news/story/229376-Mike-Bloomberg)

~~~
tqi
"Because the calculation is automated and devoid of human involvement,
criteria are consistently applied across articles and sources."

How is the training data generated?

~~~
ajoy
For the tone of voice analysis, our training data was a large set of articles
from Reuters and Associated Press - both wire services that are used by most
news outlets. We supplemented this with a dictionary of emotional weights for
words and some other heuristics.

For author expertise, we classify every article into one of 1000 different
topics based on the IPTC taxonomy. We’ve now evaluated about 7M articles
creating an expertise database on 50,000 journalists, i.e. what topics have
they written on in the past and how much do they focus on that.

------
raz32dust
I think that is ok, as long as it is not promoted to the top. The problem with
ads is (a) the extreme targeting, and (b) too much incentive for the
publishing platform to show more of them. This whole problem would be way more
manageable if they did not allow political ads, or at least disallow specific
targeting other than coarse-grained ones like may be zip code.

------
Eire_Banshee
Uh, isn't a "paid message" just a politically correct way to refer to an Ad?

~~~
scarejunba
Say I pay you to walk into a pub and tell your friends about my favourite
candidate. Your pub generally disallows advertising. But they can't really
detect this. So they don't actively do anything about it the way they do some
guy walking in with a sign. That's the situation.

~~~
m_ke
Solution: As a pub you have users sign a terms of service before letting them
in, stating that you don't allow this type of behavior and reserve the right
to ban the advertiser and the messenger from entering the establishment.

Then you make it easy to report solicitation of any activity that's against
your terms.

A single person might be able to slip by, but anyone trying to brainwash your
patrons at scale is very likely to get caught.

~~~
kaibee
> A single person might be able to slip by, but anyone trying to brainwash
> your patrons at scale is very likely to get caught.

Sure, but a slight correction here. You're implying that once they're caught,
they lose. But that's not what happens. To continue the bar analogy, the
bartender now has to start banning his customers. He can't do anything to the
guy that's bribing them.

Bloomberg got "caught" but that doesn't matter at all to him.

~~~
m_ke
In this case the guy bribing people is also a regular at the only two pubs in
town and getting kicked out of one of them would tank his venture because it's
a source of a large portion of his audience.

Bloomberg getting kicked off of the Facebook ad platform would be a huge blow
to his campaign. Facebook is huge for political campaigns because it allows
them to micro target their audience and spam them with ads without any intent
on the receiving end.

EDIT: Anyways, my main point is, if Facebook wanted to solve this problem they
would.

~~~
scarejunba
If they cared about this problem to the exclusion of all else, sure. But
Facebook doesn't want to ban all mention of Michael Bloomberg since Facebook
users want to talk about him.

------
raverbashing
This will probably run afoul of some advertisement regulations in some
countries (not that fb cares, of course).

(for those who didn't RTFA - it's referring to "sponsored posts" or "branded
content")

------
dieselerator
tl;dr

my read is:

Rather than paying for direct ads candidate Bloomberg paid "social media
influencers" to post his message. Apparently it would be difficult to enforce
a rule preventing that, so Facebook has decided to allow it.

~~~
huherto
Thanks for the tl;dr

Probably candidates and influencers should disclose if they are being paid.
After all once you are getting paid, you ARE in the advertisement business.

~~~
mc32
I think that’s fair. But they should do that for all their peddling.

~~~
luckylion
We kind of have that in Germany regarding Youtube and promotional content
("Schleichwerbung" in German, literally "sneaky/sneaking ads"). The problem is
that rules are vague so you get endless "this video contains ads"-infos even
for those that don't because producers want to be on the safe side when they
talk about or show a product. That diminishes the value of the message,
because "it's on every video, whatever", just like people react to cookie
consent banners.

If you make it too narrow, he'll gift them plane tickets, if you make it to
wide, is google giving you free hosting on blogger already something you need
to disclose on every post?

~~~
mc32
I guess the old adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”
applies...

------
dmode
It is nuts that two 100 year old billionaires are trying to become president
by out-meming each other. Can’t wait to wake up from this alternate reality

------
demadog
Could actually be a way to avoid Russian influence since we know they don’t
know how to create English ads with a sense of humor.

------
golemiprague
I don't understand this appeal for facebook to be politics babysitter, if
anything I would want them not to do anything or interfere in any way. Let
people speak their minds and leave me alone to decide.

------
sys_64738
Ban all political ads. Simple as.

------
vertig0h
Bloomberg has little organic support compared to the hundreds of millions he
is spending. 2016 was clear evidence that money does not buy elections
(Clinton outspent Trump 2:1) and this election cycle will demonstrate the same
as Bloomberg loses the primary.

~~~
behringer
If history demonstrates anything, it's that money can buy you the democratic
nomination. Bloomerg may well ruin the party and allow Trump to win the
election.

~~~
tathougies
It is neither the job of Facebook nor the government to ensure the continued
survival or viability of the Democratic or any party

~~~
vertig0h
Unfortunately Facebook and other tech companies have strong incentives to do
just that, given the politics of the large majority of their employees and the
power they have over information and elections by extension.

------
raister
money money money, money!

lyrics to their ears

to hell with doing the good to the people, let's get rich first!

~~~
Seenso
> to hell with doing the good to the people, let's get rich first!

The real sad thing is that some people don't seem to know the difference.
They've convinced themselves that whatever they do to make money means they
must be doing good, otherwise the "market" wouldn't reward it.

------
Zenst
Who knew 1984 was a business model.

~~~
tathougies
This is literally the opposite of 1984 because it lets anyone put a political
message up, rather than just the governing party. 1984 would be Facebook
disallowing paid ads and thus the only organization with enough reach to
spread its message would be the government, which would end up meaning the
executive branch

------
KoftaBob
This isn't directly related to political ads on social media, but I think it's
absurd we ever created a system where elections became a fundraising arms
race. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that system inevitably leads to bad
incentives.

Every election in the US should require a publicly funded pool that's equally
divided between the top ____ candidates using polling numbers to determine who
those are. Any funding outside of that public fund should be banned.

This way, candidates focus their time and energy on catering to the largest
number of voters, not the largest sources of donations. No donations
whatsoever should be allowed, full stop.

