It's really a question of whether or not Facebook should submit to FEC regulation or not. Other media outlets that run political ads need to submit to FEC regulation. Why does Facebook get an exemption? Newspapers literally have to run political ads by their editorial board and TV has to do something similar. It's one of the reasons why political ads are so bland and content-free: they don't want to make any claims that could be evaluated as true or false.

Yes, it's not like this is a problem that hasn't been dealt with in other media.

I think one of the things that makes it more difficult in the case of facebook is that the ad targeting makes it possible to serve specific ads only to very specific groups.

This means that if the ads say untrue or damaging things, most people will never know, as opposed to newspaper or TV ads. In my mind this argues for at least as strict controls, if not more stringent.

This was dealt with in other media the same way that Facebook decided to deal with it.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...

TV networks are required to air even untruthful ads as not to run afoul of regulations governing political ads. It's also likely that campaign laws requiring all political ads to be true would be unconstitutional.

Either way, the very fact that the Elizabeth Warren campaign is promoting a fairly blatant falsehood (and many people are happy to parrot a false talking point in the name of truth) is a symptom of the same problem that would force any reasonable entity to make the same decision Facebook just did. Truth isn't very popular, especially in politics and people (on every side of most political issues) would lose their mind if falsehoods were strictly banned.

I think it’s important to mention that Elizabeth Warren is displaying a blatantly false ad to illustrate this exact point: she thinks that it’s ridiculous that Facebook is airing obviously false ads and has no accountability.

The blatantly false part I'm talking about isn't "Mark Zuckerberg is endorsing Trump" which everyone understands to be the obviously false statement, but the subsequent argument that is still being repeated here that "If Trump tries to lie in a TV ad, most networks will refuse to air it."

A whole bunch of comments here are along the lines of: how come Facebook isn't required to abide by the rules that other media companies have to follow? But this is the exact opposite of how things are - small media companies can adopt whatever standards they want, but the broadcast networks have to air even false political advertising, because these types of regulations are more about protecting fairness and free political speech than about the truth. This is an example of Facebook subjecting themselves to the highest possible standards, instead of making arbitrary editorial decisions that smaller actors can get away with.

It's not the same high standard when they allow targeting of specific people and groups highly vulnerable to bullshit with no one else included who might identify it as such.

How would this be any different from advertising on certain shows or talk radio that peddle huge amounts of BS and are almost exclusively consumed by gullible people?

Again, the point is that the standards followed by broadcast TV are higher than the standards followed by, random media companies that aren't regulated. And what Facebook is doing here aligns closely with how public institutions that are held to the highest standards operate. The general principle regarding the freedom of speech is that the closer you are to being a public institution, the more open you ought to be in terms of the types of speech you accept.

So the criticism here isn't merely wrong, it's exactly backwards.

I can freely choose what shows, radio stations and other media I see, and see the same ads as their audience. In the case of targeted ads, I can't move from demographic to demographic as I please, so some campaigns are inaccessible to me.

To me, that opaqueness separating one filter bubble from the next is an important quality. It may raise the effectiveness of propaganda campaigns significantly.

> It's also likely that campaign laws requiring all political ads to be true would be unconstitutional.

That can't possibly be true. The cornerstone of democracy is informed voters.

That can't possibly be not true. The state has not and can not have any role in determining what is "true", if only freedom of speech has any value. As soon as the state gets to decide what is "true" and ban speech on that basis, freedom of speech is destroyed. In the USSR, there was a section in the criminal code banning "knowingly false statements defaming the state and the social order". Obviously, people who were punished under this section were ones that said anything that the communist regime didn't like, and their statements always were "knowingly false", because the same communist regime decided what is false and what is not. I don't think the US should follow this example. That's why the Constitution exists and why the First amendment is the first one. Because it's that important. Yes, the price of it is somebody can say something you don't like. You'll survive it.

Seems like a straightforward first amendment violation to me, exactly because nobody agrees on what's "true".

Defamation, for example, is not protected by the First Amendment, and deciding whether some information is true or not is crucial to determining whether it constitutes defamation.

This is irrelevant - there are all kinds of speech that are generally accepted to be outside the scope of free speech. Political speech that includes false claims does not fall under that and never has. If taking down "false speech" was something the US government can easily enforce, we'd make China look like a shining beacon of freedom. And the proper recourse to such speech is the court, not poorly paid and overworked social media moderators.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that the Trump ad in question does not make claims that are easily proven to be false - they are merely BS claims that are entirely unsubstantiated. I don't think they'd be taken down even if a rule against false claims existed and was properly followed. There's no evidence given for such claims, but not all claims without evidence are false.

Part of the regulation could be that Facebook can only serve stateless political ads. If a politician wants to advertise, they can't pick and choose any parameters.

It would be better if advertisers had their own pages where all of their advertisements would be shown as posts with the parameters they used for targeting.

Basically Facebook needs to make the whole process maximally transparent, and claim it is just a telephone line, and only people telling the lies are responsible for the lies.

That sounds like Facebook's Ad Library feature[1]. It doesn't show you the targeting parameters used, but it does show the age/gender demographics the ad was actually shown to.

[1] E.g. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

What if we just banned targeting users and groups of users and instead only allowed ad targeting based on the content of the web page?

Basically a smart version of a banner ad.

I'd support this but moneyed interests would not. Advertisers wouldn't have an excuse to build the digital panopticon anymore, and a lot of the effort to build it would be wasted. That'd be too much justice for this world.

Surely there are some parameters that would make sense? I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country. There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc

"Surely there are some parameters that would make sense?"

For sure...

"I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country."

They should be targeting eligible voters. If a local election is taking place across the country, then, of course, you shouldn't be seeing the ads.

"There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc"

No, this defeats the purpose. We should be trying to expose people to more viewpoints - not creating more echo-chambers.

FEC rules don't really cover who sees what, they cover what anyone can see.

Now we can expand on those rules to dictate who can see what, but no matter who views the ad, it would likely be bland, and confer no new viewpoint at all. Lest it fall afoul of FEC rules.

What we're really talking about with FEC rules, is a return to the middle, because extremist views can be shut down by pointing out misleading content in the ads and subsequently rejecting them. Whereas the bland, meaningless stuff will always be free of any misleading content, and be subsequently approved.

> Whereas the bland, meaningless stuff will always be free of any misleading content, and be subsequently approved.

I'm not sure what media you consume, but TV and radio ads always seem filled with misleading content about political rivals.

Your 4th paragraph contradicts your 6th.

>> Part of the regulation could be that Facebook can only serve stateless political ads. If a politician wants to advertise, they can't pick and choose any parameters.

> Surely there are some parameters that would make sense? I don't want to see political ads from a local election across the country. There's also no reason for me to see an ad for the Republican primaries if I am voting in the Democratic primaries. Etc

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. A couple factors need to be balanced: the ads need to have the minimum targeting to not be wasteful and pointless, but they can't be so narrowly targeted that oversight by the media and voting public becomes difficult.

I think the right balance is something along the lines of: 1) coarse-grained geo-targeting allowed down to an MSA at the narrowest and 2) no targeting based on interests, demographics, or ideology.

I was honestly thinking for national elections when I wrote this.

There are some parameters that make sense, for example targetting congressional districts.

What I'm mostly against is zip code, ideology/interest, racial/sexual/etc factors being taken into consideration.

Why would you buy such an ad given that almost every election in the US is geography bound?

Even TV & newspaper ads are regionally bound.

Well you kind of have to allow targeting based on location/home location.

I like this solution but they wouldn't. It brings them back to the problem of trying to tell which ads are political in nature or not and policing normal ads for such content.

Some parameters will still be picked for them, right? It would be a bit silly to show ads in Dutch to Danish people that can't speak Dutch.

Television advertising isn't stuck in the dark ages. Political candidates run and create ads targeted at specific counties or districts.

Next to Facebook targeting, that is the dark ages.

True, but that level of targeting isn't completely unprecedented. Direct mail was an extremely targeted form of political advertising and faced zero content regulations. (Much of the targeting was achieved by buying magazine subscription data from magazine publishers; you could target households pretty effectively based on which magazines they subscribed to.)

Agreed. The fact that it's harder to do on the web for whatever reason shouldn't mean they get to ignore the rules.

I see this sort of paradoxical mindset all over the place: X breaks the rules but X is just so successful, or so full of potential, so shouldn't we just bend or break the rules for it? But the fact is that X is probably successful or full of potential in large part because it's been breaking the rules, and the rules exist for a reason.

If there were rules governing political ads in social media, they would look very much like Facebook's policy. At least TV ads (which are more tightly regulated due to the use of radio spectrum, which are public goods) are regulated as to force TV stations to air even political ads they deem untruthful:

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...

From that perspective, Facebook deciding to censor untruthful political ads would be much more akin to ignoring the rules.

What this ignores is that there is a finite amount of ads one can run.

It would be easy enough for Facebook to classify ads as political/non-political and for political ads have more scrutiny over what they decide to air. And have strict penalties against those who choose to mis-classify their ads.

Or make political ads visibile publicly for anyone to search for details as to who created them, how much they paid, how many people were targeted.

All these are valid solutions to the problem, but Facebook doesn't want to do it, because if they can get away with what they're doing right now, they can make a ton of ad money.

> It would be easy enough for Facebook to classify ads as political/non-political and for political ads have more scrutiny over what they decide to air.

I doubt it is as easy as you think because not all political ads look like "vote for foo!"

They will evolve to look like governor foo paid company xyz which sells home security products to make an ad about how unsafe the country is...while governor foo runs on a platform all about reducing crime rates...etc

Look at some of the propaganda during the 2016 election era for instance

Facebook already classifies ads about "social issues, elections or politics" and those ads are subject to extra scrutiny[1].

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/180607332665293

> Or make political ads visibile publicly for anyone to search for details as to who created them, how much they paid, how many people were targeted.

Isn't that already the case? You can already search all political ads and see who ran them, how much was paid, and the number of people who saw the ad.

Is it? I can’t find any documentation on how to query all the political campaigns that are currently active, who is paying for them and who they’re targeting. All of this information is critically important to be made public to ensure the integrity of our elections.

Did you look at https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/ ? It should show all active (and inactive) ads, information about the page that ran the ad, and who paid for the ad. It doesn't show targeting, but it does show amount spent and the gender/age/geography of who saw the ads.

This used to be more of a problem, but IIRC they have forced political ads to be publicly visible to anyone on the page that's running the ads.

>> Yes, it's not like this is a problem that hasn't been dealt with in other media.

And it was dealt with poorly. My whole life, minorities (persons of color esp) have been scapegoated in elections in ads on TV, etc. So, yes, political ad censorship has been dealt with by media, and the "deal" was that victims would be minorities.

In a sense, Facebook just makes it fair. Now anyone can criticize anyone, everyone gets to suffer equally. Those who don't like it should have spoken up decades earlier.

I'm posing anon for obvious reasons. My hope: Lets let Facebook win this round, so we as a society come up with decency rules that help all of us, rather than just defending protected groups.

> minorities (persons of color esp) have been scapegoated in elections in ads on TV, etc.

Do you have any sources for this?

IIRC, Willie Horton.

My whole life, minorities (people who earn more money than average esp) have been scapegoated in elections...

What if you said this? What happens when Bernie Sanders run a dozen ads saying the “rich” haven’t been “paying their fair share” and what standard would allow this to be consider truthful, or will the ad need to define words like rich and fair (good luck on that 2nd one)?

Yes, talking about corporations avoiding taxes is the same as talking about Mexicans and refugees coming to destroy your country. You really need a dose of nuance.

This was pointed out elsewhere but needs to be repeated:

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...

The regulations exist in the exact opposite direction as you claim - TV networks are required to air even untruthful ads as not to run afoul of regulations governing political ads, which means Facebook's policy is closely aligned with the actual regulations as they exist.

Also, most newspapers at least online are are outsourcing part of their ad placement to third-party ad tech companies so I'd be shocked if there was any editorial control.

> It's one of the reasons why political ads are so bland and content-free: they don't want to make any claims that could be evaluated as true or false.

I keep getting mailings in Ohio indicating that if I sign a petition to put a certain issue on the ballot The Chinese Will Know Where I Live And Come Get Me. It's a completely idiotic campaign, and of course, it's all blatant lies. (similar ads appear on television)

This place you're living sounds relatively pleasant though.

Direct mail is entirely different. The campaign doesn't need anyone's prior permission to do it, and it might not even be sent by the campaign.

Then, is Facebook the newspaper, or is it the mail (in terms of how it should have to treat political ads)? j-c-hewitt thinks it's the newspaper. But why that and not the mail?

Note well: I'm not saying that Facebook should be treated like the mail rather than the newspaper. But, given that they can target ads to individuals, that aspect seems more like the mail, at least to me.

Zuck's best way to 'wash his hands' of it is to adhere closer the newspaper standard. Though, if he does this, it may mean less money.

Facebook advertisements are a public forum. Moreover, there is an intermediary party that can exercise review.

Direct mail is not a public forum. Moreover, who would accept or reject a direct mailing campaign?

How are Facebook ads a public forum? They send an ad to the viewer of a page. They can, and do, control viewer-by-viewer who sees which ads. That's like sending an ad to a mailbox.

But I wish I could reject direct mail campaigns...

many of them are promoted posts, with discussion, and which are re-shared by individuals to their network.

OK, but that's like you got something interesting in the mail (or even email), and forwarded it to someone. That's still not a public forum.

We are going to wreck FB within 5 years with something far less centrally controlled, and you want to waste government resources on this? The company is 15 years old.

Math doesn't work that way or bitcoin would be toast.

Honestly if a lie that blatant even needs to be censored, then I think we can just say democracy is a failure. What concerns me are the lies / truths that depend very much on values and biases that would get caught out because of Facebook's own biases or people gaming the system.

I don't buy defeatist statements like this anymore. Let's be real, if it turns out lies actually do "need" to be censored for whatever basically measurable definition of need you prefer, are you literally going to give up on democracy? What are you going to replace it with? Unless you just give up on morality entirely, you're still going to try to find a solution.

That means that the only thing "...then we can just say democracy is a failure" accomplishes today is give you a clever-sounding way to avoid thinking about a hard problem. That's not a good thing.

You could give up on a particular implementation of democracy, without giving up on the whole thing.

Council democracy does not require politicians to try to appeal in absentia to hundreds of thousands of voters they ostensibly "represent", for example.

> You could give up on a particular implementation of democracy, without giving up on the whole thing.

Yes, that's pretty much my point.

>> are you literally going to give up on democracy

American democracy? Oh yeah I've absolutely given up. Candidates I like never even come close to winning. Often they don't win ballot access. I'll still vote, but I'm done contributing to campaigns or being optimistic about the outcome.

I would expect most of the ads in question here fall into one of two categories. One of them is considered false by one side, but an argument can also be made by the other, because each side is probably cherry-picking some data, looking at different contexts with different values, etc. I honestly don't think FB can do this at scale without bias, arbitrary judgment calls that don't seem fair and take too long to resolve, etc. So let's say they just let all those cases slide. The other category is things that are what we on HN would call blatantly false, where there is no supporting evidence, tons of evidence to the contrary, and it just violates common sense. Are we saying that we trust people who fall for the latter, and do no independent research before basing votes on things they see in FB ads, are people we should still trust to judge national economic plans and foreign policy in the debates? I'm sorry if this is defeatist, but I just don't think so. Those aren't people I even want to be on a jury of my peers. I'd rather just be judged by the man with the law degree and years of experience. Maybe this is a step in the right direction, but I just don't even think it's a drop in the bucket. With so many people who lack basic knowledge of civics but have the right to vote, I think we're just past the point of no return to idiocracy until there's some major collapse and we start from the ground up.

But the mere fact that we're having this argument is beyond me. After every election, which ever side loses goes grasping at straws. With Obama it was the birthers. With Trump it's social media ads. With the last 2 Republican presidents it's been the electoral college. I mean I'm sitting here watching the 49% (concentrated in a few dense areas), claim they have more of a democratic mandate than the 48% (spread out in very culturally distinct areas), when most people don't even vote. I see both parties as being inappropriately quick to judge and legislate matters that they're completely unfamiliar with. I'm pretty individualist, but US democracy seems to just be a constant race to a tyranny of the majority, with the legislature having abdicated many of their responsibilities to the executive. Violations of the law by the government just seem to get ignored because that's the way it is now. So if I did get to pick what we replace the current US democratic system with, I'd far rather go for at least a parliamentary system where instead of me thinking I have a representative for my geographic area, my party gets a share of the power and has to figure out a way to share power with the other parties. It's less direct, but if I don't get to be as self-governing as I want to be, I don't want to be governed by a bunch of people who fall for Facebook spam.

I agree. I feel like creating the illusion of a disinformation-free platform will only weaken peoples' ability to discern it. Taiwan has a hands-off strategy for dealing with it for that reason [1].

1: https://cpj.org/blog/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-...

> Honestly if a lie that blatant even needs to be censored, then I think we can just say democracy is a failure.

The problem with what you are saying is, if we accept that there can be any curbs on free speech at all, "how could anyone be stupid enough to believe that?" is not a useful guiding principle for setting the threshold at all.

The classic example of speech that is not covered by the First Amendment is crying "fire!" in a crowded theater. Of course it's rather crazy for everyone to trample each other trying to escape a fire that does not exist when they do not even smell smoke. That is completely beside the point. We govern the speech based on the damage it does, the intent to do damage, and the utter lack of any redeeming qualities to the speech.

FYI, the example of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater comes from a case against someone who was claiming that drafting people into the military was involuntary servitude, and was illegal and worth resisting. I think they should have been allowed to say that.

Oh, I should have chosen a different example! I certainly think the argument that we cannot censor based on whether or not someone would be a bit foolish to believe the lies being spread still stands, but I'll leave it for now.

(Although I believe I share the OP's sentiment that the whole thing is not a sign that democracy is in great shape...)

It's surprising to me that they'd run it by the editorial board. How do you know?

I mean, sure, newspapers have policies for acceptable ads, but don't they try to keep editorial and advertising separate?

Example:

"The Minnesota Daily at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, houses its news staff and advertising staff separately and does not hold meetings between the groups."

https://splc.org/2018/10/student-media-guide-to-publishing-p...

Leaving aside the question of whether or not the FEC should regulate social media ads (and personally I think they should), as a practical matter, they can't for the time being. As of a few weeks ago with the resignation of a commissioner, the FEC lacks quorum, and the administration apparently isn't planning to appoint any replacements for the time being, which means they can't issue rules governing Facebook or anyone else, nor can they initiate enforcement actions or investigations, or issue advisory opinions about what campaigns or companies should and shouldn't do to comply with existing rules.

Not saying that the current administration is trying to abuse this, but having the executive branch able to paralyze the body governing elections seems like a massive loophole.

Is this something that congress could (technically, not politically) fix themselves, or do they really depend on a nomination from the executive branch?

> Is this something that congress could (technically, not politically) fix themselves, or do they really depend on a nomination from the executive branch?

You could have any vacancy for more than X-days be filled by the minority party. (i mean even nominating an acting member -- you don't need to get an approval)

Proposal assumes two parties and would codify this. Two parties is one of the ways Americans keep getting themselves screwed. No need to codify it. Maybe one day we shall fix it?

Other parts of norms and conventions in USG assume two parties as well.

They can't appoint people, but they could change the quorum rules to allow the currently sitting commissioners to regulate. It would require Presidential signature, though, or enough votes to override a veto.

This is a red herring - there's no law against untruthful political advertising. Such a law, broadly enforced, would likely be unconstitutional and how do you suppose that you enforce it? Also, if that was the law, it wouldn't be up to corporations to determine what is true and the responsibility would fall between the politicians and the regulatory body that decides what the truth is. That sounds to me like a totalitarian nightmare but I suppose YMMV.

I don't know why it would be any different constitutionally from false advertising in any other context. It's not a crime per se, but false advertisers can be held civilly liable for misleading consumers, and individual consumers can sue false advertisers, as can the FTC on the public's behalf (presumably it would be the FEC instead, but work similarly). The court system (so, presumably a jury) decides whether or not it's false.

Civil liability is an entirely different matter altogether but what's problematic about false advertising isn't that the claim was false, but more that you're breaking a promise. This isn't about free speech, but more about an implicit contract being violated. Political speech, on the other hand, is explicitly what the freedom of speech as a right is about.

Either way, I don't believe anyone would claim that in case of false advertisements, the responsibility falls on the publisher of ads, not the advertiser. It's not generally possible to evaluate the claims made in advertisements - if I were to say, something I'm selling will work for 10 years and will offer replacements if it breaks in the next 10 years, how would the ad publisher know if I would honor the claim several years later?

> one of the reasons why political ads are so bland and content-free

I'm not sure I would describe them as bland: https://youtu.be/LcjEe9guEIA?t=435. I bet the bland ones are by choice.

> a question of whether or not Facebook should submit to FEC regulation or not

There are official political ads by campaigns, and then there are non-official political-influencing ads/articles/etc. A new challenge will be defining how "political" something has to be for it to be considered a "political ad".

I honestly didn't know there was an existing system for this, though it makes sense. And given that it does exist, it's an absolute no-brainer that the world's largest media platform should be subject to mass-media regulation.

> Why does Facebook get an exemption?

Snail mail and email also get exemptions.

Let's not pretend like there was some overarching architecture for all of society's communication.

> Why does Facebook get an exemption?

Because it's not apples to apples.

Facebook is like NBC but it's also like Comcast. Comcast doesn't have an editorial board screening all the content that its product indirectly facilitates.

Newspapers basically are content creators and curators at the core. If newspapers stopped doing that, they basically wouldn't exist. If Facebook eased up on ranking, filtering, and promoting, it would just be the old thefacebook.com.

Agree not apples to oranges but disagree w/ comparison to Comcast. The ad platform is literally Facebook's (and Google's) core business.

This is not accurate. See the discussion here: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...

> But overall, it’s inaccurate to say that "most networks" will refuse to air an ad by Trump with a lie in it. We could find no evidence that most networks reject false candidate ads.

Not sure which TV ads you see, but the TV ads I see suck. Not all of them, but many of them talk about how someone voted for something and completely mis-construe the intent. So there has never been truth in political advertising, only a thin veneer of pretending that this is ok.

So I’m not sure that the boards have done their job.

I’d certainly call bs on them, and that’s on ads from my own party!

> It's really a question of whether or not Facebook should submit to FEC regulation or not. Other media outlets that run political ads need to submit to FEC regulation.

Only for political advertising related to federal elections. That's a subset of all political advertising.

I can understand why FB shouldn't be allowed to just exempt itself from the FEC rules that other media follow. But I don't think their policy on "no filtering for truth" is something the FEC bans in those other media, so I don't see the privilege.

If social media companies should be held accountable for the so-called integrity of our elections, shouldn't they presumably also be responsible for not censoring legal speech?

It's a fallacy to believe that the ability to determine the truthfulness of the content of an ad is binary. 100% or 0%. It's a spectrum. There are obvious truths, shades of gray, blatant misinformation, and everything in between. At the very least, they should clearly disallow verifiably false information. An advertisement aimed at Black voters with the wrong day for voting? That's clearly voter disinformation aimed at voter suppression. How close Facebook gets to the gray areas is by no means an easy problem, but it's patently false to pretend they can do nothing.

Facebook do disallow clear voter suppression ads like that one, though. They have a specific rule banning voter suppression which applies to all advertisers including politicians, and they definitely enforce it. One of the articles going after their hands-off approach to political ads (I think in the Guardian) even specifically attacked them for banning this whilst leaving other lies alone.

Disinformation about voting dates or choices seems out of bounds. But any negative ad is at a basic level voter suppression.

> It's a spectrum

The parent comment agrees very strongly with that.

> verifiably false information

Look at Snopes for an example. Relatively few assertions are "pants on fire" false.

Empowering Snopes to effectively censor Facebook by deciding what is true and false seems incredibly dangerous to me.

> (because when was the last time someone ran a political ad that was wholly truthful?)

Perhaps this is a good time then, to revisit this norm itself? Why is this allowed? Sure, politicians lie, it is known, but we've reached a point where the lies on one side (and it is one side, the Republican side) have diverged so far from reality than the base of that side can no longer engage in any meaningful debate on any issue. It's not even a question of bias, most Republican talking points and positions literally do not make logical sense. They scream and rant about problems that don't exist, and refuse to acknowledge the ones that do that are inconvenient. So much of the right is based on such hard misinformation as to be ridiculous.

And of course Democrats fudge the truth a little here and there too, and that should stop as well. To be frank I think the benefits of "Free Speech" are vastly overvalued. You shouldn't have the right to say whatever you want, at least not in the context of politics. You should be held to account for factual inaccuracies, perhaps not penalized but it should be noted, and you should be penalized for what can be demonstrably proven as outright lies and misinformation.

> To be frank I think the benefits of "Free Speech" are vastly overvalued.

Free Speech really only applies to the government, not private companies, so FB can impose whatever rules they want (though that might depend on if the FEC decides to try and enforce some regulation). Also, even Free Speech has its limits, for example, yelling "fire!" into a crowd to cause a mass panic when there is no fire is not protected speech.

Other examples include slander, this wiki page has a nice discussion on Supreme Court decisions as it relates to the First Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

The Schenck case, which created the "yelling fire" line was overturned over 40 years ago:

"In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action""

According to case law and Supreme Court decisions, "Free Speech" is much more absolute than most imagine.

Ref: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

It's also worth noting what, exactly, was the offending speech in that court case, and several related ones (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debs_v._United_States). It was anti-war propaganda, and specifically, calls to resist the draft. The defendants were high-ranking members of the Socialist Party of America.

Principled defense of free speech is often accused of being a slippery slope fallacy, usually by the same people who give "fire in a crowded theater" as a counterpoint. I wonder how many of them are aware that the phrase itself is a historical example of a very real slippery slope.

> so FB can impose whatever rules they want

Except, as evident, they don't. And they don't really have a financial motive to police speech, in fact they have financial motives to turn a blind eye to it.

And moreover, Facebook not making more money does not affect society at large, but the continued distribution of misinformation has direct repercussions for society at large.

Your political opponents think exactly the same about you, though. Your belief that "truth" would be objectively measured and enforced is pretty naive. Especially if you count "refusing to acknowledge problems that are inconvenient" as untruth.

Look at it this way. Huge numbers of Americans and especially Democrats believed for the longest time, and many still do, that Trump was a Russian spy. The entire "Russiagate" phenomenon was investigated to ludicrous depth and found no evidence such claims were true; so does that mean every journalist and Democrat politician that fueled those flames now goes to prison, or can't speak in public anymore? Think about what you're arguing for here! That was an absolutely massive factual inaccuracy so how would it be held to account?

And let's not even get into cases where someone genuinely believes they're repeating something true, which turns out not to be. If that were the case, given the replication crisis in science virtually all politicians would end up being unable to speak publicly as they'd have repeated the claims of studies that later didn't replicate.

Orwell had a great essay on the subject of freedom of speech and of the press.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

What makes it particularly interesting is that it was written by a socialist who volunteered to go and literally fight fascists (with bullets, not fists), and it was written in the immediate aftermath of WW2. You'd think that a person like that, at a time like that, would be very sympathetic to the kinds of arguments that are being paraded on the left today - that, basically, once politics gets sufficiently extreme, immediate concerns about that should trump any abstract freedoms. And yet, Orwell criticizes the treatment of Oswald Mosley (of the British Union of Fascists) during the war...

The irony is that the essay was effectively censored itself - it was meant to be a preface to the Animal Farm, but no publisher was willing to publish it as such. It was eventually published on its own, 27 years after it was written.

> but we've reached a point where the lies on one side (and it is one side, the Republican side) have diverged so far from reality than the base of that side can no longer engage in any meaningful debate on any issue

As someone who has no love for the Republican party, I have to say that your statement shows a sort of tunnel vision. Just take the latest Ukraine scandal: it's true that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate his political rival, but at the same time, it's obvious that Hunter Biden only had his job because he was the US Vice President's son. That's corruption by any reasonable definition. Yet plenty of Democrats are insisting that there was nothing improper with Hunter Biden taking the job, and that this is all fake news. But if it were Trump's son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, guess how Democrats would react (and rightly so)?

> To be frank I think the benefits of "Free Speech" are vastly overvalued. You shouldn't have the right to say whatever you want, at least not in the context of politics.

I prefer the First Amendment to the truth police. Of course, if I get to pick the truth police and they always agree with me, that's great for me. But it's not so great for anyone who disagrees with me, and it ultimately means the end of democracy.

Oh, there's nothing "sort of" about it- it's the kind of tunnel vision and mentality that make up the extremists on every side (the ones screaming in everyone's face and giving their respective parties a bad name). It's a little sad that the post you responded to laments the loss of meaningful debate in the very same breath as a sweeping umbrella vilification of the entire party and every one of its values.

The first step of a debate is to have a set of understood and shared facts, the reality of whatever is currently going on. On some issues, yes, this is still possible. On the vast majority, and unfortunately the ones most pressing, it is not.

If you talk to the average Republican voter about, for example, climate change, you'll hear about China is faking the whole thing to make American industry less competitive, or about how, since we got some snow last night, that must mean it's a hoax. If you talk to them about job growth, they'll tell you we need to resurrect the COAL INDUSTRY, which was in rapid decline already and has only accelerated as coal continues to be less and less appealing as an energy source, because, you know, it's coal, and it's not very good. Jobs have been slipping in that industry since the 1940's, and automation has only worsened it. Yet Trump campaigns about revitalizing it, and the rest of the Republican party enables that, no matter how unrealistic it is.

It's just non stop conspiracy theories, disinformation, denial of fact, on and on. Watch Fox News some time. It's unbelievable how utterly insane the coverage is. I'm not talking a "different point of view" I'm talking about they are literally destroying any sense of truth to push their agenda, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone paying attention because that's basically what Roger Ailes started the company to fucking do: Appeal to conservative viewpoints that felt left behind as progressive stances became more and more mainstreamed.

This is not a conspiracy theory: Fox News' origins, along with smaller outfits like InfoWars, various talk radio stations, all the way to more recent ones like Brietbart, have been running this grift for decades; enabling the intellectual rot that has destroyed the GOP from it's core, and annihilated everything they ever stood for, all of it murdered on the altar of making money.

I say all of this as someone who is ashamed to acknowledge being a conservative, who has slowly watched the party he grew up believing in become a sad parody of it's former self, able to stand for NOTHING, NOT A THING other than squeezing out the last few dimes before the planet bursts into flames. What the GOP is today is a disgusting husk, a cancer-laden zombie kept moving by Koch brothers money and the sheer refusal of huge parts of the country lacking in proper education to admit they were fucking conned.

> Watch Fox News some time. It's unbelievable how utterly insane the coverage is.

MSNBC is every bit as unhinged as Fox News. It wasn't always that way, but it's become worse and worse over time. Rachel Maddow's ranting and raving about the Russians, panel discussions about Tulsi Gabbard being a Russian asset - it's bad. I feel sorry for anyone who gets their news from either channel.

Except that MSNBC doesn't dominate the left like Fox does the right. There are many networks that liberals watch: MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, etc. etc. and that's not even going into the fact that liberals are generally smarter consumers of news as a whole, reading multiple papers, watching multiple news networks, not to mention independent sources too. Conservatives rarely if ever leave the bubble.

Most liberal-leaning media in the US went absolutely insane over Russiagate. You wouldn't do much better by watching CNN. Every day, the walls were closing in, the big breakthrough was right around the corner. I don't doubt that liberals are typically more "sophisticated" than conservatives in the US, but that doesn't translate into political sense. The greatest condemnation of their sophistication is that so few of them predicted Trump's election, and that so many still have no idea why he won. That's why the Russiagate narrative is so popular among American liberals. It gives them an easy way to explain a phenomenon that they fundamentally do not understand.

I have not seen a single leftist defending Hunter Biden. Hell, the majority I talk to are hoping that's what sinks Biden's campaign, since as a candidate, he's the only weaker option to oppose Trump than perhaps Hillary Clinton was. The only reason he's even IN the primary is because he was attached to Obama, if it weren't for him being the VP, nobody would care who the hell he was. He's failed to run for the presidency, what, 3 times prior?

I don't care about Joe Biden. He's as crooked as any of the other big business Democrats. He'd do the country a tremendous service in just fucking off back to Pennsylvania and never going on TV again.

> I prefer the First Amendment to the truth police.

I welcome the truth police with open arms, because the alternative is what we have now: a free-for-all in which well funded interests, both political and corporate, can spew whatever well produced and intelligent-sounding bullshit they please onto our mass media and an unsuspecting populace. This is not sustainable. I would've really hoped that people would know better and be able to properly vet sources, but it's been proven, again and again, that they cannot, or will not.

We're talking about Democrats, not "leftists." Last debate, Joe Biden denied any wrongdoing by his son, and Cory Booker then chastised the moderators for even asking about Hunter. Elizabeth Warren has also been reluctant to condemn what looks like obvious corruption, which is notable, given that that's one of her signature issues.

> I welcome the truth police with open arms, because the alternative is what we have now: a free-for-all in which well funded interests, both political and corporate, can spew whatever well produced and intelligent-sounding bullshit they please onto our mass media and an unsuspecting populace.

This always sounds like a great idea if you assume that you're the one who will get to decide what's true and what's false. But what makes you think the truth police themselves won't be corrupt? Once they exist, and once they come for your views, it's too late. By throwing away the First Amendment, you're condemning your own views to eventual suppression.

> Joe Biden denied any wrongdoing by his son

I do not care about Joe Biden. He's a disheveled artifact of pretty much everything wrong with the Democrat party. You can criticize him all you want and I'll agree with you but please stop presenting this as though it means anything about the vast majority of the Democrat party, which again, is not supporting him.

> Elizabeth Warren has also been reluctant to condemn what looks like obvious corruption, which is notable, given that that's one of her signature issues.

What "looks like corruption" that she hasn't condemned?

> But what makes you think the truth police themselves won't be corrupt?

You say this as though corruption isn't fought off regularly in basically all functions of Government? And that's not say we're totally free of corruption, because well, yeah. But in general the country gets along okay. It's not stellar and could be improved quite a lot, but in the grand scheme, roads are maintained, government workers are paid, government contractors get paid, our sewage and water systems (in most places) are fine, our electrical grid is pretty standard.

You know it's easy to get disillusioned and say our Government as a whole is a shitheap, but honestly, we're doing okay. Certainly well enough to say that just because something the Government does might be influenced by corruption isn't reason enough, by itself, to not even try.

And this idea that mass media should be policed for something resembling accuracy and honesty means the first amendment is dead is just ridiculous false dichotomy. We police speech CONSTANTLY. Spreading information you know to be false about a person is already covered under the law as libel, and in order to put that law to someone speaking requires THOROUGH, WELL DOCUMENTED evidence, it's not just something that gets thrown around, other than by people who don't understand what it really is. We police speech that incites violence, again requiring thorough proof as we do for any crime. In my mind, there's no difference between that, nor any requirement for the "Truth Police," and going to a place like a talk radio station and say "This host on this date espoused a thoroughly debunked viewpoint that has been proven false, demonstrably, with data, multiple studies, and testimony from experts all over the country. Because of this we're assessing your station a $50,000 fine, and $5,000 per day additionally that this host is on the air and has not yet fully retracted this statement, and accepted that they have been spreading misinformation."

> What "looks like corruption" that she hasn't condemned?

Hunter Biden working for Burisma. She was asked about it, and the contorted answer she gave to avoid condemning it is rather hilarious.

> You say this as though corruption isn't fought off regularly in basically all functions of Government?

And you're proposing giving a corruptible institution vast new powers to control public dialogue.

> And this idea that mass media should be policed for something resembling accuracy and honesty means the first amendment is dead is just ridiculous false dichotomy. We police speech CONSTANTLY.

Libel and incitement are very narrowly defined, and proving either is incredibly difficult. Those laws could be used as a political tool to suppress speech, which is why they're so narrowly construed.

I can predict with 99% confidence what will happen if the truth police are instituted. The truth police will be heavily influenced by the same industries and financial interests that dominate government today. Many views that you hold will be declared false. Black Lives Matter will be declared a form of incitement. Socialism will be declared a false ideology.

I'm just very surprised by how many Americans have decided after Trump's election that the First Amendment has to go. It's very short-sighted.

> And you're proposing giving a corruptible institution vast new powers to control public dialogue.

And you're continuing to argue as though the vast already thoroughly corrupted institution already doing that is somehow better.

> Libel and incitement are very narrowly defined, and proving either is incredibly difficult.

No shit. I'm saying exactly that laws to police speech can be done right. It should be a sizable burden of proof needed, it should be difficult specifically so that the Government can't simply say "that's bad, stop saying it." That's my whole damn point.

> I can predict with 99% confidence

Is this prediction based on something besides your own biases?

> I'm just very surprised by how many Americans have decided after Trump's election that the First Amendment has to go. It's very short-sighted.

I said no such thing. Please read my posts if you intend to respond to them.

> And you're continuing to argue as though the vast already thoroughly corrupted institution already doing that is somehow better.

No, I'm arguing that that institution should not be given vast new powers to determine what can and cannot be said, based on what it deems to be true and false.

> I'm saying exactly that laws to police speech can be done right.

The right way to do it is to not give the government the power to censore "untrue" speech in the first place. What you're proposing is incredibly dangerous, and would be a clear break with the 1st Amendment - the bedrock of American democracy.

> Is this prediction based on something besides your own biases?

It's based on a simple analysis of what would serve the interests of those who wield great influence in government. Since November 2016, I've heard lots of liberals argue for censorship of "untrue" or far-right speech. They seem to imagine that they can create a system in which they will determine what is true or acceptable, and that those definitions will be imposed on the "bad guys." I think that's incredibly naive. Lots of conservatives call Black Lives Matter "hate speech" and the like. If you give them a tool to suppress speech, they'll turn it against BLM and other causes they dislike.

> I said no such thing. Please read my posts if you intend to respond to them.

You're arguing against the 1st Amendment. You want to impose an official government standard of what is true and false, which can be used to muzzle speech. I get that you want this standard to be objective, but the obvious direction that such laws will go is towards wide-ranging political censorship. The 1st Amendment is central to American democracy, and one shouldn't play around with it. Leave it alone. You can't ban people you think are wrong from speaking. Try arguing against them, convincing them.

Not all ads necessarily contain statements that would force Facebook to take a side on any issue or become an arbiter of truth. They could simply restrict political ads to essentially just "Vote for [candidate]", or something similar.

You mean ads paid for by (American?) registered campaigns or anyone who buys an advertisement deemed 'political'?

It's easy to define an ideal ad or ideal bad-guy scenario, the problem is in the grey areas of categorizing such a chaotic, broad, and unpredictable group of content.

That's always what ends up making this sort of thing a bad idea. They're always at massive risk for false positives, selective enforcement, moral panics, etc. It's also a giant distraction from real problems in the world and provides little long-term ROI compared to all the work that will go into it.

It should be either all ads are okay with some obvious-tier moderation (ie, no ads promoting violence) OR no political ads at all. Let's not give FB et al even more power to choose what ads are okay, please.

What about ads that promote war?

That obviously seems to be promoting violence to me, but unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion.

Promote it in the abstract, or promote a very specific war.

The first seems inside the line to me (stuff like 'support our troops' or 'Join the army, take the fight to our enemy'). The second is past the line (stuff like 'we need boots on the ground in Syria, write your senator!').

I guess legally there is a difference between 'promoting violence between citizens' and 'promoting violence in war'. Since the first is usually illegal, and the second is not.

In general, government has a monopoly on legal violence. As such ads that promote war are promoting legal violence. Rules against promoting violence are (implicitly) targeting illegal violence.

At the same time, if FB reduced political adds (including any war/military related ones), I would be supportive.

How much money would Facebook actually lose by banning all political ads?

Seems like the amount of revenue their getting from political ads might not be worth the headaches and distraction they are causing the company.

You might be right, but I think banning political ads would probably lead to people doing even more massive political astroturfing campaigns within facebook using the funds they would've spent on facebook ads.

So facebook goes from having a political ad problem where at least they get paid, to having a political manipulation/content problem (well a bigger problem than they already have) that they still have to solve but don't get paid for.

I think it's less about revenue and more about common carrier status. Though FB has recently put out confusing signals [1], it seems that if they start to editorialize what content is delivered, even just a fraction, they are liable to editorialize it all - at HUGE cost.

1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...

They currently do all sorts of blocking on what content is delivered. Try and run an ad with nudity. The sorts of nudity that is routine in a European advertising context is blocked on Facebook, because they choose not to. They could easily do the same for political ads, but they don't because they choose not to.

This article erroneously claims that if Facebook is a publisher it loses section 230 protections. This is not the case. See https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 for more details.

Facebook is not a common carrier, and has never been one.

I guess the problem is what is political and what is not political is not always so obvious?

Looks like it's $81M in total: https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-clinton-election-facebook-ca...

Although I've read elsewhere that Trump's campaign alone spent ~$100M on FB.

Given the level of pressure on Zuck, I'd say he's not doing this to make more money. He's doing this to avoid establishing a precedent, and avoid negative repercussions later on. For him it pays (in the long term) to be as neutral as possible.

> That's not going to end well for them.

Define what you mean? Like users will stop using it or advertisers stop advertising?

Facebook IS already banning some categories of ads that could normally upset you - for example you cannot advertise a Gun Store - even tho owning firearm is rooted in being an American. But I don't see Americans leaving in hoards to some other venue. Same with sex ads, viagra, etc, etc. Facebook has their own reasons to block them and it only "ends for them" with higher stock price.

It's going to end badly for in the form of more Congressional oversight, not less; more politicians yelling at them, not less; and more people angry at them, not less.

I’d be okay with facebook just not running political ads, tbh.

I don't get it, how come there's no outrage over political ads shown on TV? If it's a legal ad, why should Facebook police it?

Political ads on TV are regulated.

Not in the way you're thinking: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...

how so? I didn't see any mention of the content of TV or radio being regulated (other than the disclaimer of who paid for it) in my quick search.

This article appears to say that the content is unregulated. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/should-tv-stations-ban-fal...

But the ads in question were aired on TV, this letter is asking FB to go above and beyond what most TV networks are doing (CNN being the only one who did not air the trump ad, objecting because it called them "fake news")

Because lying TV ads are old news. FB is an easy target, by all the parties.

They should just categorize all political ads as "likely untruthful and misleading" and label them as such. If you're a politician and you're advertising on Facebook, your ad should be label "This ad is political and is likely untruthful or misleading. Viewer discretion advised."

Imagine if Facebook required all Ads to be truthful and anyone found to have posted a false Ad would have all their Ads taken down for 2 weeks.

It's not like the Ads are going to go away.

Ads can be both truthful and misleading.

The problem is who decides the truth?

Children in cages Abortion is murder

Both phrases are true or false depending on who you ask and the end result will be no ads for any politician because they all use questionable language that could be considered false.

They should have a 'truth' button to accompany the 'like' button, and so people can see who thinks something is 'true', and if they identify with that group. Then there is no censorship, and people also get some sort of crowdsourced 'truth' value that allows them to see the source of bias.

Sorry, that just sounds naive. It’s all well and good until the echo chamber you live in meets a different echo chamber, which has a different idea of what’s true. The resulting conflict would instantly devolve into furious tribal warfare with people using the ‘like’ and ‘truth’ buttons as synonyms. Except with the worse feature that a popular post would seem to be additionally endorsed by Facebook as true.

Good point. 'like' and 'true' are not really different. Maybe allow people to 'like' political ads (or ads in general) will have the same effect.

Bots and troll farms would be popping champagne the day it was introduced.

How do TV stations do it? How does the radio do it? Use those same rules.

I feel like ads should have equal time provisions too.

There was an ad that had Paul Ryan pushing a grand mother off of a cliff that ran on TV. So Facebook is free to run that, right? Swiftboating, GWB draft dodge charges (later rebuffed after CBS reported it,) the famous "Daisy" ad that was run against Goldwater, etc. I'd love to see where people draw the line.

Giving two wolves equal time to discuss their bid for the county shepard is, in itself, not going to produce better governance. (And will happen to entrench the false dichotomy of 'there are two, and only two, valid choices.)

In this analogy, if the people are truly sheep, there is nothing to be done. Democracy is finished. The entire premise of Democracy is that voters can be trusted on average to make correct decisions on who should lead. If that premise is false, the wolves win in any scenario no matter what.

If 60 voters want X offered by two candidates but 40 want not-X from one candidate, not-X wins 40-30-30. It's not a false dichotomy, it's the flawed outcome of plurality voting.

There is regulation for political ads in almost any medium. I don't see why Facebook is exempt from that.

The anger towards Facebook is easy to understand as they categorize Breitbart News as "trusted" in their News section.

agreed. i think the only right answer here is to just ban them all especially if its not a significant source of revenue.

ruining the brand for pennies on the dollar is not smart.

Political ad spends is expected to be 6 billion USD. It is by no means a small market. Not to mention influence that gives in lobbying

Would anybody besides Facebook's shareholders be upset if they just deemed political advertisements verboten on the platform?

From what I've read on the subject, it seems like limitations like this generally serve the incumbent (who benefits from default name recognition that challengers lack).

This is perhaps reasonable approach (many people in this thread are suggesting this!), but it seems like this a thorny problem because there is no "neutral" position.

"Put them all up against the wall" is pretty neutral. Just saying.

They could ignore truth all together and simply focus on factual accuracy.

It’s this type of subtle, rational-sounding pacifism that paves the way for evil to erode societies. Regulatory institutions have to actively and vigorously prohibit brainwashing of the masses. Even if it’s unpalatable, it’s the only real way to preserve democracy.

"I plan to do X, vote for me" truthful.

"Don't vote for Y, they want to kill babies" not truthful.

It's pretty clear to me which ads are in bad faith. I really just wish Americans were bright enough to see through the bullshit themselves but alas, here we are.

> Wherever they draw the line, they're going to reject someone's ad, and be exposed to screams of how they're biased for the other side

Today it's not about being "unbiased" and objective, it's about receiving equal amounts of bias allegations from both sides. That's what the NYTimes has done, liberals are saying it's not harsh enough on Trump.

In the recent Canadian election, the conservatives used Facebook to target Asian Canadians with ads falsely claiming that the liberals wanted to legalize hard drugs.

It shouldn’t be facebooks job to police that though, we should have legal recourse when that happens

There are some things that are just provably false ("Donald Trump voted for the green new deal") - these ads should not be run.

Yet, that one is right next door to a very frequently deployed political lie: $POLITICIAN voted against $VOTER_DESIRED_POLICY, when in fact what they did was vote against some massive bill primarily about some other topic entirely that contained some head nod towards $VOTER_DESIRED_POLICY that may or may not even have done anything, or voted against a bill that did indeed have $VOTER_DESIRED_POLICY but had so much other crap in it they couldn't vote for it for some unrelated reason.

Teasing that sort of thing out is above the pay grade of anyone Facebook is going to hire to resolve it.

FB is either a service provider or a content moderator.

One brings liability the other provides an exemption.

I know what I would choose. Let the people ads lie about sue the ad purchaser

They are clearly a content moderator. You can tell that by trying to post a nude picture.

Content moderation does not reduce or remove the liability protection of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Not real sure how you can put political campaign ads in the same bucket as child pornography and still claim "good faith" ?

Where did I say anything about child pornography?!

Are you perhaps confused because I mentioned the Communications Decency Act? It's true that one of the purposes of the CDA was to regulate pornography on the internet (although I don't think it was about child pornography--the pornography concern was about children seeing pornography on the net), but those parts of the CDA were struck by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).

The CDA also, in section 230, said that providers and users of interactive computer services are not to be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Section 230 was not struct down in Reno v. ACLU, and remains in force.

Intent. The law always uses intent. To compare political ads to the list below is facetious at best and I was calling out one example of content that could be moderated with protection and comparing it to a political ad. You seemed bothered by the comparison. As would most rational folks be. Not sure why this is difficult to understand.

(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

Actually, law does not always use intent. Intent is the primary basis for one of the philosophies of jurisprudence, not every judicial body/judge follows that. See textualism for an example where intent is irrelevant.

Found the lawyer

Hah. I'm flattered, but I have never been remotely associated with law either through education or through work. :)

Would you agree "good faith" implies intent is measured ?

Good faith implies intent of the entity is measured, not necessarily of the way the law is written. Textualists like Gorsuch would actually not read into the intent of the law writers and interpret "good faith" how he pleases cause that's as specific as the written law is. Don't you agree?

Not sure I know the supreme court well enough to judge their judging

I just try to interpret the laws as they are written with my limited legal experience :)

That said I think I can agree