Why is his policy so diffficult for people to swallow? He has made a standard rule without room for arbitrary censorship and everyone is upset. If you can pay, you can publish on Facebook. This is a good thing. Fairness is important when it comes to monopolies offering services.
That's not true for Facebook or any other advertising platform. These platforms have entire sets of policies on what ads they will or will not run. Some restrictions are legally mandated, while others are based their own internal standards (i.e. they won't run blatantly racist ads even though they aren't technically illegal).
The decision to run political ads regardless of whether they contain lies is a specific choice they are making, not something that emerges from a universal principle of access to paid advertising.
And it's Mr. Zuckerberg's right to choose that route, as CEO of his company. But it doesn't absolve him of criticism for making the decision the way he did, whether from Mr. Dorsey, or a random nobody on this forum.
People are upset because he’s allowing ads that flat out lie simply because they’re a political ad. If the some Democratic nominee put out an ad saying “Trump reverses decision to ban LGBTQ+ from the military,” despite it being blatantly false (there’s no gray truth in that), they would allow it.
This rule means I could go form a PAC and post a ridiculous ad like “Voting for Biden will give you AIDS.” That has no basis in reality, yet from Zuckerberg’s words, it sounds like they would allow it.
Good! That's fantastic. Some people believe those things. It's not just your voice and those of people like you that should be heard in a democracy. No one in any country has sole authority to determine 'fact'. If they did, we should just appoint them to be king, call them 'god', and be done with the whole government thing.
The courts have already upheld the FTC’s authority many times in regards to false and deceptive advertising. I can’t legally make an ad that says “Vaccines cause autism; Buy homeopathic natural remedies!” Why is political advertising any different? Because then someone is the arbitrator of truth? The FTC does that already, just not with politics.
