
Facebook should ban campaign ads - legendarygeek
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/13/ban-facebook-campaign-ads/
======
notatoad
The fact that a candidate can tell obvious, blatant, and easy fact-checked
lies with impunity isn't Facebook's problem, it's America's problem. (And the
rest of the world's too.) In any functional democracy, a candidate telling
blatant lies under their own name should be political suicide. It somehow is
not, and that's stupid, but I'm not sure banning campaign ads is the right
solution.

Banning political ads not directly paid for by a campaign that had to put a
candidate's name behind their words seems reasonable. But banning ads from the
actual campaigns themselves seems like an overreach.

~~~
tlb
That's true with TV ads. You can't tell a huge whopper in a TV ad without lots
of people seeing it and saying "WTF? I can't vote for this guy."

You can, however, promulgate specific conspiracy theories in highly targeted
ads that the majority of people never see. If 0.1% of people believe some
crazy theory, you can show them ads linking the opposing candidate with it.

Perhaps almost everyone believes _some_ crazy theory.

In the future, everyone will be fooled for 15 minutes.

~~~
jinushaun
You can thank Facebook and their wonderful innovations: algorithmic news feed
and social graph.

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piiswrong
Traditional media should ban compaign ads too. They have been lying for a
century.

~~~
quietthrow
Totally agree but traditional media was never as ubiquitous as internet based
media companies. Their pervasiveness is just at completely diff level. Hence
the effects are much more impactful compared to traditional media.

I agree with the mallorean below. Lobbying should be eliminated. It’s just a
legal way to bribe and it has corroded the democratic system.

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nkurz
The article makes a reasonable argument that the US would benefit if Facebook
were to unilaterally refuse to run political ads, but unless I missed it, it
made no mention of why Facebook as a profit driven company would benefit from
refusing to accept money from political campaigns. This would seem to be a
glaring omission, because unless Facebook stands to benefit, it seems unlikely
that Facebook would voluntarily make such a change.

So: how can we better align the incentives of the social media companies with
the goals of the public as a whole?

~~~
gopi
As the article said the TAM for political ads is only a few hundred million
dollars. That's not worth the increased scrutiny.

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viburnum
They should go one step further and shut the whole site down

~~~
oarabbus_
Why's that?

~~~
viburnum
[https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/21/17144748/case-against-facebook)

------
quietthrow
This post was just on the front page of HN. Why did it disappear all of a
sudden?

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malloreon
Ban all political advertising everywhere.

publicly finance all campaigns. Every candidate gets the same public funds to
run their entire campaign.

ban all lobbying. eliminate the government -> private sector job pipeline.

eliminate the concept of "money is speech" \- speech is speech, and that's it.

