> 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.