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.