
Was It a Facebook Election? - evolve2k
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50779766
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smashah
It's rich for this to be coming from the BBC. I'm no BBC basher but when it
comes to peddling lies from the tories, the BBC were willing and ready.

Was this the Facebook Election? No. It was the Deception Election.

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evolve2k
In Australia political ads are regulated and need to include the phrase
“Autorised by FirstName LastName, City”.

This applies to Television as well as all print ads. The reason for this
requirement is to hold all political paid advertising accountable to an
identified local citizen even if they represent a large political party.

Facebook ads currently do not align with this criteria and I’ve read other
articles where the Electoral Commisison May take weeks corresponding with
Facebook to have a bad actors post taken down while in the mean time the bad
actor is able to spin up many more pages under a different name with no
visablity or accountability.

I’m separating general take posts and contents here from paid advertising. For
example in Australia the Palmer United party spent $40 million on Facebook ads
and achieved roughly 3% of the vote nationally that on preferences went to our
conservatives who needed a 2% swing and this alone helped them gain power. To
give you an idea the Palmer party candidates didn’t even bother to put up
street posters of themselves or attend public forums like other candidates
locally.

I see this as a open backdoor in winning democratic elections.

How do we address this as democratic citizens where Facebook is prevalent in
our countries?

In Australia we still have a Electoral Commission that is fairly well
regarded. I’m thinking out loud, a possible solution could be if the Electral
Commisison required anyone wanting to undertake paid political advertising to
register with them and then this authorisation/authentication was required to
be linked up when creating online political ads on major platforms. Later when
there’s a complaint the Electoral Commission could after investigation
withdrawal authority and on all major social platforms their ads having losts
permissions could come down all at once.

This would need local regulation/legislation to inact but do you think if it
was it would be effective?

What solutions can you see?

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evolve2k
The only other idea I have is to open source a public whack-a-mole and
encourage user submission by concerned milenialls who hunt bad ads and lodge
complaints. But I’ve not thought this out more.

