There are more options than "Facebook regulates its ads" and "Facebook permits everything."
I am in favor of having a permanent, public repository of political ads, where they have to sit for a "cooling-down" period prior to going out. This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.
Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads. There are a lot of options between open season and censorship, and it's only to Facebook's benefit that the debate is constrained to this axis.
We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse. Because you know that any such institution would just let pass false information that just happens to comport with liberal beliefs, while giving enhanced scrutiny to assertions from other viewpoints.
I was just going to upvote and keep scrolling, but I saw the three replies to your post critique something you said that I strongly agreed with.
> We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse
This so true in this day and age. The quality of journalism has collectively nosedived, but the journalists keep producing and continue to guide the “conversation”. I’m not quite sure what those who disagree with the statement actually do believe is going well and why journalists need to have even more control over the conversation.
> ...would just let pass false information that just happens to comport with liberal beliefs
This is the natural course for a technology company in modern society. The biases of tech company employees is clearly more left-leaning. If Facebook employees or contractors were deciding what’s true and false, the information displayed on Facebook would (does?) have a leftist slant. This is a bad thing to any fair-minded person and why Facebook shouldn’t be regulating free speech in political ads.
We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse.
This statement doesn't make sense to me. Nothing to do with conservative vs. liberal biases; just that the majority of current political discourse does not go through even nominally journalistic outlets, let alone rigorously journalistic.
> We don’t need journalists to have even more of a strangle-hold over political discourse
How does "a permanent, public repository of political ads" give journalists any advantage? I just mentioned them as one potential user of a public database.
If anything, I think journalists need more influence on political discourse. Currently the discourse is controlled by media companies, not journalists - and there is a big difference there.
> This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.
I believe this proposal to be worse than the current state of affairs. I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body, and doubly so to one which skews >90% to one political party.
> Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads.
Once again, I do not understand this rational! I assume you do not like how one party in particular is acting, but you would delegate that very same party the power to oversee the censors over all online electoral ads?
> I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body
Who said anything about censorship?
What I proposed has two parts. One, when a political ad is bought, it must wait a certain amount of time (I propose a week) before being displayed. Two, immediately on being bought, it must be made publicly accessible in a permanent database.
The latter lets anyone fact check the ad. They DON'T get to take down the ad. But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users. This deters micro-targeting groups with misinformation. It also creates a public record of what a campaign has said to whom, for contemporaneous and later reference by the public.
A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist." I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media. I fundamentally disagree with censoring political speech, even lies. But the current system is unworkable. We need heightened and broadened disclosures for micro-targeted ads.
> But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users.
I believe I understand the implied difference between sequestering a video somewhere where it can be evaluated by the public and simply "blasting it to users" alongside content they are consuming, but I wonder if sequestering videos in this way would have the effect you think it will have. It's a system that would reward highly provocative videos with the potential to immediately go viral regardless of their intrinsic merit or truthfulness.
> A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist."
Right. The issue with the system you're describing is, entirely too many people will react to an online story from the NY Times pointing out a dozen untruthful things about the latest, newly introduced and sequestered angry political ad from whoever by delighting in the distress caused by the lies in the ad, joking about how the libs have been owned, passing links around to the video, and generally spreading falsehoods about the critiques of the ad and the people doing the critiqing. If the whole trolling effort is successful then it will become a meta-story about stupidity and falsehood among the people who aren't dumb enough to believe whatever is being asserted in the ad, but the one thing that will not happen is everyone joining together to condemn the falsehoods in the ad.
> I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media.
Right, and as nice and democratizing as that can be, the practical effect is often to legitimize bullshitters and put them on the same level as serious people. I am afraid in the example above that is part of how these ads would go viral.
Or maybe it's not all that bad. I guess I hope not. I do think your idea is interesting.
I am not at all sure it would deter misleading ads, since the truth or falsehood of a given claim or set of claims does not necessarily matter much to a chunk of the population. I am pretty sure the mechanism the OP described might reward especially outrageous ads designed to break out of the cage and go viral, in the manner I described.
option 2 will create status quo bias. The system in power will marginally favor ads that keeps the current system in power.
option 1 can't be effective unless you also know the targeting criteria of the ads. Otherwise, interested parties cannot create 'counter propaganda' at the same cost/benefit ratio as the original propaganda campaign. And all it is really doing is decreasing the time to counter propaganda, not reducing the volume of it.
There are more options than "Facebook regulates its ads" and "Facebook permits everything."
I am in favor of having a permanent, public repository of political ads, where they have to sit for a "cooling-down" period prior to going out. This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.
Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads. There are a lot of options between open season and censorship, and it's only to Facebook's benefit that the debate is constrained to this axis.