Major League Soccer is going through this problem now. They prohibit political displays in stadium but are now in the business of deciding whether signs that say things like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" or "end gun violence" are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can.

https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...

I wouldn't have a problem with expanding that to include social issues. You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.

This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.

> You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.

Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.

But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.

MLS teams are walking billboards. Ads subsidize the world, especially live sports events. Enjoy your 2000% base ticket price increases.

Are the base ticket prices based on cost, or on supply and demand?

Does it matter? The point isn't that tickets will become unaffordable, the point is that the sports leagues themselves will disappear.

Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.

How big of a problem would it be, if the professional sports leagues were to disappear? There are probably many opinions on the matter.

But I agree, without advertisements, professional sports would not survive, so it's not going to happen.

I don't think that the impact of less professional sports on a societal level will be very significant, but if the reason to get rid of ads at sporting events is to make them better, then it's (probably) counterproductive to take steps that kill off a large portion of those events.

Clearly this apocalyptic prediction begs the question of how much investment is required, since we're have a variety of shorts with different levels of spending, and raising over the past 20 years. If there were 2se less money in football, it's unlikely to disappear

I don't think this is apocalyptic. It's not that football would disappear, but professional football leagues would or they would be diminished. I don't know whether that has a significant negative impact on society.

Sorta. I mean, corporations are not entirely apolitical. For instance, during a recent heated pipeline approval process in my region, the pipeline company was running “look at all the good we do” feel good ads all over the place. They are not directly saying “vote for so and so” but are promoting specific ideas. Like car companies promoting the idea that your car represents freedom - that’s not apolotical. Cities have been rebuilt to accommodate a lifestyle car companies promoted.

No, but see Budweiser did buy that ad space. You bought a ticket to see a game.

Political campaigns also buy ad space with money. It's not as if there's some discount political rate.

What is an ad? Can the beer cans say "Coors"? Can airplanes fly by with ads trailing? Can people's clothing display brands? Can the players' shoes have the Nike swoosh? Can pop-up shops sell their goods at the store or give out samples? Can a company buy tickets just to plant attendees who will loudly wear their brands? These are all forms of marketing. If they are permissible, then how do you enforce it? No billboards over a certain size? No audio or video ads?

People often choose advertised cheaper products over unadvertised more expensive. You’re going against that pattern

Sure, ticket prices go up accordingly and demand for their sales drops off consequentially.

Wrong.

Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.

Yes we must respect our corporate overlords, by their good graces we sit in their stadiums. It would be disrespectful to treat this private space like a public forum in any way. Even if the stadium WAS partially built using public funds...

What is functionally different between "marching down main street" and "walking down highways"? Many places basically have highways as psuedo main streets.

It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.

Because civil rights has always been most effective when the protests were out of the way in designated areas.

So you are saying they should protest were you can easily ignore them?

"Please do not bother me with you trying to not get killed by the state anymore."

“Look I know your the victim of systematic racism and oppression that’s led you to march, but goddamnit I’m trying to get to Burger King!!”

“I’m here for bread and circuses and I’d appreciate it if you kept your uncomfortable reality away from me so I don’t have to confront or think about it”

Like a moth to a flame.

If you were a social movement that wanted to get your message across, you wouldn’t seek out a captive audience? The distuption is part of how to communicate

The difference is that it's easy to have "a private org can set its own logically inconsistent policy" (and every possible policy except "everything is allowed" is logically inconsistent) but impossible to have "we will only allow universally agreed upon good things in this space".

The latter turns into "everything is forbidden", which is also logically consistent... but not useful or practical.

The Portland Timbers literally use the Cascadia Flag. I mean, it's a joke to imagine that political messages are banned.

I think fascism is inherently political while racism is not necessarily.

I’ve been told everything is political, when questioning someone once. So I suppose Twitter will bow block all ads?

A post from the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985

A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:

> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.

Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.

Not to mention explicitly political merchandise, #resistance shirts, Don't Tread On Me flags, bumper stickers, QAnon coffee mugs...

The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.

So does that mean some group like the American Cancer Society can't advertise?

American Cancer Society is a good example of an organization that is clearly, unambiguously political, but which most people probably don't want banned.

Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.

Sounds like the American Cancer Society can advocate for itself but not for candidates or policies.

Fine:

Donate to fight cancer

Not fine:

Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research

How about ACLU or Planned Parenthood?

same apply. ACLU can ask for donations or talk about their services, like representing people who can't afford representation.

PP can as well. They can't say "vote pro-choice" but can advertise that they provide women's health services including abortions.

Basically: you can talk about what you do that isn't related to elections or votes in congress.

Can the NRA ask for donations?

My guess is that it depends how it is phrased, the imagery and the landing page. "Donate now", ok. "Donate now to keep NRA working for you", ok. "Donate now so we can fight policy XYZ", probably not.

This is really interesting, because it seems that in some cases (ex. NRA or EFF) it doesn't actually matter what the ad copy is. It's very clear why they're soliciting donations (to lobby for their ideological viewpoint).

So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".

I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.

Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.

I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal.

I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.

If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.

Both organizations have PACs. Their PACs should be covered by any ban on political advertising.

What good or service is "Donate to fight cancer" advertising?

Sounds like a Kickstarter for a cancer cure, it's a legit service.

I would think that yes, it means they couldn't advertise.

That's a good system, but I'm not sure it's actually workable at the scale of Twitter or Facebook's ad platforms. That's a a lot of human review.

Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible.

Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable.

Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".

Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.

Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves.

Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.

A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.

For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]

No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.

Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.

There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.

It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.

I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.

Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?

[0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840

Well, twitter makes let's say $1Bn per year, so they could spend 15000 man years per year and still be breaking even.

You have not justified that 15000 people is enough to moderate all the content.

It's almost as if those companies shouldn't be operating at the margins that they currently do...

I'm reminded of the dodge that religious institutions have achieved. In exchange for tax-exempt status, they are forbidden from explicit political stances and endorsements; yet in practice, many churches are highly influential in the political process, as they of course are allowed to take moral stances (abortion being the big one), and encouraging their congregations to "vote their consciences", etc.

Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.

The Sierra Club has a similar “dodge.” Most non-profits are tax exempt and many have separate PACs that aren’t tax exempt but are indirectly supported by their tax-exempt cohort if only by providing a mailing list from which to solicit donations.

I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example.

This is going to be s can of worms.

Grassroots movements don't spend money on ads. They are the viral.. spread naturally and don't have an ad manager or staff.

Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.

Probably. But likely a smaller can of worms than allowing political ads.

The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. But whether that satisfies the (both literal and metaphorical) parties who've been grousing about political ads on Twitter/FB is a different story. Twitter might correctly point out that a given contentious ad doesn't satisfy the FEC's definition and that still won't stop the complaints.

Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.

> The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those.

I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I've never heard of this definition of "political ad" - can you provide a link?

There'll be a lot of feeling out that line because it's impossible to draw a distinction that will work in every case. It'll be especially hard in cases where particular issues become heavily associated with one party or another though I guess they could just say product ads only, that would probably be a little easier because the line between a political and non-political product is a bit easier to draw.

Most social networks already have to decide what counts as "adult" content, which has just as much gray area as what counts as "political".

Yes, but making a mistake on what is and isn't adult content or people seeing it when they shouldn't or vice versa doesn't have much negative impact on society. A private company that lets political gray area ads slip through from one side, but not the other, will likely have an impact on society.

Coca-Cola is political. Microsoft is political. All firms are political.

Politics don't go away just because you ontologize them as "private sector".

I suppose we'll find out on 11/15. Could use elections/votes as a proxy for what constitutes a political ad.

If the thing/person being promoted can be voted on/in, it's a political ad.

My first thought would be that any ad that isn't advertising a product or service for sale should be classed as a political ad.

What about my side project Read Across The Aisle? We make a free news reader app that helps people keep track of their media bias. That is inherently political (the whole point is to help people become more well-rounded), but running an ad for my free app shouldn't be seen as a political ad since we are devoutly non-partisan.

they aren't saying they're banning partisan advertising, they're banning political advertising. a non-partisan political ad is still a political ad.

that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.

Oh I realize that they wouldn't ban my ad. I'm saying that the heuristic you suggested isn't quite nuanced enough. It seems like this move will create lots of controversy and actually make political advertising on twitter more fraught (because it will still happen, but just not above-board). This may end up being a net negative for society if it pushes things into the seedier underbelly (gaming twitter's algorithms so your tweet pops up in the ICYMI section, buying followers in order to appear more influential, etc.).

So- can people sell political bumper stickers or no?

That’s exactly how this is going to be gamed.

An option they have is to just filter it by to only allow companies that are trying to sell a product.

I believe the process to which you refer is called "democracy" ;)