
McCain wants to Regulate Facebook - elsewhen
https://www.axios.com/mccains-latest-surprise-regulate-facebook-2498450082.html?utm_medium=linkshare&utm_campaign=organic
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sp332
The summary at least looks good. There's no reason online ads shouldn't be
regulated just like every other kind of ad. And pushing for more transparency
is a good sign.

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Eridrus
> There's no reason online ads shouldn't be regulated just like every other
> kind of ad

The only things currently regulated like this are "broadcast television,
radio, cable and satellite communications"; this doesn't apply to mail
advertising which as recently as 2012 people were pointing to as very targeted
and having it's own transparency issues. But politicians haven't been super
keen to spend tax dollars on dealing with the issues there.

And the proposed regulation doesn't apply to small entities (reported
elsewhere), because it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is a burden.

And we have no actual evidence saying this would have prevented anything. The
"Islamic Republic of France" ad that got some news traction recently isn't
really any more unhinged than what Trump said on national TV.

Axios is right that tech companies will probably go along with it because this
is not the environment to fight this sort of things, but this is not
objectively good legislation.

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sp332
This is mostly about increasing transparency. It's not (yet) about
implementing regulations because we don't even know what kind of problem we're
facing yet. This is basic stuff, it's like step zero before we can start to
address the problem.

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Eridrus
This _is_ regulation. Someone has to extend the effort to figure out which ads
were political or not.

