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.