So what you're saying is, because a senator could conceivably be running ads, then any ad that claims to be by a senator should be approved without scrutiny?

Besides being preposterous, that same argument applies to literally anybody in the world except, I guess, Mark Zuckerberg.

So it sounds like Facebook's algorithm for detecting abuse is `if submitter == "Mark Zuckerberg" { reject(); }`

> So what you're saying is, because a senator could conceivably be running ads, then any ad that claims to be by a senator should be approved without scrutiny?

That was not said in the message you replied to.

Its not entirely clear what the message was saying, in my opinion

They were using the Cathy Newman method.

Facebook has strict controls against impersonating Zuckerberg in ads for a very good reason. Facebook has had those controls for years and they have nothing to do with politics. This is the reason you can't impersonate Zuckerberg in ads:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/technology/fake-mark-zuck...

Banning ads mentioning Zuckerberg is easy, so it makes sense that system works well. Imagine building a review system to combat fraudulent political advertising on Facebook, how difficult and complex that would be.

More like "abuse is hard, but let's at least get this super easy case right". Also, yeah, don't put words in my mouth.

Getting the super easy case right doesn't justify completely failing at the entire fundamental premise of the feature, which is to inform viewers that an ad was paid for by a particular political entity. When anyone can buy an ad that claims to be paid for by a senator, this alleged feature in fact becomes misinformation, and quite dangerous misinformation at that as it's got Facebook's seal of approval.

If Facebook cannot get this feature right 99.9999% of the time, they shouldn't be doing it. And it seems they're getting it right literally 0% of the time (barring Zuckerberg of course, but he's not on the ballot this election so that's irrelevant). This is so bad it should be a huge scandal; has Facebook gone back and vetted all of their political ads yet to make sure nobody's been taking advantage of this?

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

No. "Iron manning" is stupid, it's just an excuse to dismiss a response because they weren't charitable enough towards your flawed argument.

Strawmanning is bad too of course. But responding to a reasonable interpretation (which is distinct from "iron manning"'s demand of responding to the strongest possible interpretation) is how discourse normally works. If someone's reasonable interpretation of your argument doesn't match what you were trying to convey, then that means you fucked up your argument.

In this particular case, the parent's argument is literally that Facebook is justified in not rejecting the political ads because senators are likely to buy ads. So that's what I responded to.

Yes, and it's also always been more important for a publisher to defend more carefully against any misrepresentation relating to their own endorsement or trademarks on their own medium, while punting to take down processes for misuse of other's trademarks, etc is mostly allowed.

Why? I am sure many other humans are named Mark Zuckerberg as well. Their life is probably very complicated now...

Treating names as unique identifiers? Quadruple ouch.

Maybe they need to flip their process. Rather than default accept, maybe they should have default reject.

Why wouldn't Zuckerberg ever buy Facebook ads? I doubt they'd let him run personal stuff for free, and I doubt they'd be sure he'd never want to run personal stuff.

The simplest way would be for him to say, "hey, I'm never going to buy ads on my own site, so don't let anyone impersonate me." If Zuck wants to tell us something on Facebook, he'll just put a banner at the top of our feed. Or if he does want to run ads as himself, he'll pull some other founder-fiat move. Keep in mind the engineering motto of the company we're talking about. They don't need to stick to the rules.

Corporate boards usually have controls against appropriating company resources for personal use.

Presumably there is a tax implication too? In the UK this would probably be a benefit-in-kind and taxed say it's market value as income.

Yes. Same in the US. Things like private jet use are applied as income. However, I'm not sure you would have to do so at retail rates. For example, you would have to pay taxes on the cost of the private jet use. The marginal cost of something like running your personal ads on the favebook platform is so low as to probably not be considered "material" by the tax man.

Considering he controls 60% of the company, such controls are meaningless.

The controls would be something agreee to as part of taking the company public or some stage of auditing.

Owning a controlling stake doesn’t mean you can fiddle around with every corporate asset at your whim.