If a group wants to post on social media, they can just post on social media. Ads increase the reach of those with money. That is exactly what they do and nothing more. Why would we want to further amplify the voice of those who have money? The fact that the cause is the abolition of X or the support of Y is a non sequitur, in either case it is the viewpoint of someone with the money to promote their voice.
I have very little concern that the opinions of those with large quantities of money at their disposal are underrepresented in politics, or do not have the ability to make their voices heard.
What you're missing is that all viewpoints you'll ever see are intrinsically those of someone with the money to promote their voice.
Suppose you have an idea in your head and you want to get it out there. The first thing you have to do is express that idea. Write it down or create a video etc. That takes time, which is an opportunity cost. If it takes you an hour, that's an hour you couldn't spend working for money, which means that somebody who has to spend that time working for money doesn't have the time to express their idea.
On top of that, the more time you spend polishing your expression, the more convincing you can make it, so right off the bat there is a direct relationship between time/money and speech.
Then you need to get people to look at it. If all you do is write a document that sits in a drawer in your house, nobody will ever see it. So you need to spend more time distributing your idea, or get other people who are willing to spend their time distributing it.
Political advertising is just paying a third party to do that for you. It costs less than hiring a staff of people to promote the idea "organically" (otherwise it would be poor value for money and nobody would pay for it), which means it enables people with less money to get their message in front of people.
If I may jump in here, I live in a country where political advertisement is strictly regulated and almost all political debate takes place on public television, available to everyone, and there's a commitment to neutrality in reporting and equal representation of all parties.
Now this surely doesn't give everyone the same voice and many people are still marginalised and despite the lack of money involvement are excluded, but it may be worth pointing out that the US status quo is not the only model on this planet.
Instead of increasing the asymmetry by letting those with more money expand their influence even more, you could take measures to level the playing field.
I can see all sorts of things working for a small country that do not scale to a large country. Something that works well in, eg, Denmark might be appropriate if applied to somewhere of comparable size and complexity like the New York city centre but in appropriate if applied to a continent.
One thing that I think would actually be easier to do in the US to achieve the same thing is to cap and publicly finance campaign spending. Given the strong emphasis on free speech that the US has it might be simpler to go the reverse route. If 'money is speech', even out the playing field on a financial basis.
The problem is when candidates have to take money from special interests just in order to buy enough advertising to cause anyone to have even heard of them. Provide enough public money so that candidates don't have to do that, and then candidates won't have to do that.
You forget that there is never enough money or enough advertising. All the money comes from "special interest groups" except if is provided by the government. Of course people "hear" the candidates...it's just that the candidates want a 24/7 audience, lately they have whole media corporations delivering the message for them. As we know most of the media organisations are now partisan (either by choice or by obligation). Maybe little regulation wouldn't hurt to give a chance to the little guy who can't afford to buy a media corporation?
Yes there is. That's the point. Candidates regularly defeat better-funded opponents because there is a threshold of exposure past which the voters have heard what there is to hear from both candidates and more spending has diminishing returns.
> Of course people "hear" the candidates
No they don't. Can you name all of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination this year? First try to off the top of your head. Now here's a list:
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/president/democratic-...
How many of the ones you missed have less than $5M right now vs. more than that? Pretty good correlation, right? Yet I doubt your preference between Sanders vs. Biden has that much to do with which of them has more money, because they both have more than the threshold amount needed to make you aware of their positions.
> Maybe little regulation wouldn't hurt to give a chance to the little guy who can't afford to buy a media corporation?
How is it supposed to help the little guy who can't afford to buy a media corporation to pass a law restricting the little guy from buying political advertising, meanwhile the people who can afford to buy a media corporation carry on doing so as ever?
There's an interesting study out there (I'll dig it up later if I find it), that finds that the average American has virtually no influence or voice on what is discussed in media. There is nothing civic or egalitarian about American media or politics any more, it's no surprise that it appears like a cynical spectacle. It is indeed all advertisers, famous people, full-time twitter agitators, and Fox and CNN.
The irony here is I think that the social platforms actually could be used to authentically promote common voices if they were designed with that commitment in mind. If the rules don't change for the owners, I don't see it happening.
Conversely, targeted advertisement lets you bombard people with certain inclinations with ads that nudge them to behave in a certain way. That isn't free speech, its targeted manipulation. The targeting is whats important here. For selling goods and services, its fine. For selling leaders or tarnishing leaders, its evil.
Allow opt-in targeting by allowing classified ads, old-school newspaper and Computer Shopper style. Otherwise I think it is now pretty clear the cost is too high.
The point is that it costs more to promote if you can't buy advertising, which increases the advantage of those with a boatload of money. The people who own Fox News or Facebook would still get to decide what everybody sees but then someone who disagrees with them couldn't even buy advertising to air their competing ideas.
The person with zero dollars has zero voice either way. The question is whether someone with thousands of dollars should be able to get their message in front of the relevant people, or only someone with billions of dollars.
> Conversely, targeted advertisement lets you bombard people with certain inclinations with ads that nudge them to behave in a certain way. That isn't free speech, its targeted manipulation. The targeting is whats important here. For selling goods and services, its fine. For selling leaders or tarnishing leaders, its evil.
Suppose Big Oil wants to build a pipeline in your back yard. They're going to have your neighbor's house seized through eminent domain (or maybe yours), then install a big ugly pipe that will reduce your property value and forevermore be carrying flammable poisonous carcinogenic petroleum that could at any time leak out into your groundwater. You have no idea that this is in the works and won't know until it's too late unless somebody tells you about it right now.
I live a hundred miles from you along the same planned pipeline and I don't want it, so I get together all the people I can find and pool our money to buy issue ads to notify everyone in the path of the pipeline that it's going to happen if we don't get together and oppose it. We can't afford to buy nation-wide untargeted ads, but we can afford to target the people who live right near the planned pipeline and have views that make it likely they'll help us oppose it.
Is this to be prohibited in your opinion? What do you suggest those people do instead in that case?
It's not your feed, it's their feed; you're just the person eating it.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that this is a 100% opt-in service. Why do we get to say what FB is obligated to do and to what standards they have to keep their website at?
My own two cents is that Facebook should be dismantled to restore competition, then be allowed to do whatever it wants.
From the earliest of its beginnings, one of the greatest flaws of democracy was masses being susceptible to manipulation, and Facebook massively amplified this. It has been repeatedly and reliably used for manipulation of voters with unprecedented effectiveness and on an unprecedented scale.
Trump and Brexit showed that even the oldest and most mature democracies are not impervious to such manipulation.
I was shocked how Facebook's Libra initiative quickly detracted people: all of a sudden, we're all discussing whether they should be allowed to run crypto currency, and nobody is talking about how they broke democracy. Almost as if the whole Libra thing is a giant distraction...
The truth is they let you see most of your friends' and family's posts, but pretty much any commercial or non-profit's post is held for ransom. If you "like" a local band or want to hear from the local gardening club, they will be encouraged to pay to "boost" their posts to you.
If fb had to say "you will see the posts from your connections based on how much they pay us," up front when registering and in all their ads (like the fast-talking disclosures in US drug advertizing), then people would have a more accurate view of the service they are using. Of course, long privacy disclosures would be necessary too.
Effort can take the form of standing on the street holding a sign, and it takes money to make a sign, and time to stand there.
It can take the form of going door to door and talking to people and giving them printed materials. You need the money for the printed materials, and the time to canvass the neighborhood.
Same for running for local political office.
Same for making a documentary, or a podcast, or a YouTube channel.
Same for running a Facebook ad.
Communication takes time and money. Getting money also takes time, to earn it, to inherit it, to ask donors or investors for it...
There’s no way to have any communication at all without these elements.
Those with money can pay someone to tell someone else something.
Those with time can tell everyone they meet.
That's how a democracy. Some have bigger voices compared to others.
Zuck himself, ironically, has helped create that situation by deliberately reducing organic reach to force people to pay to be heard.
This is a cynical ploy for money on Zuck's/Facebook's part. If they really cared about free speech, they wouldn't hobble the organic reach of political actors.
If I'm able to have more signs or youtube channels people will pay more attention to me and thus I'm using an advantage the other party may not have the financial ability to respond to.
I think this idea could go further but it seems obvious that money is another unbiased tool to promote your speech. Money doesn't have a political affiliation. People can use money in a biased way just like they can use a camera, tv channel, or sign to have a bias. The medium isn't biased the way it's used is.
Especially when we already live in a massively unequal stage where a few coorporations have access to the most popular websites, magazines, newpapers, tv channels, allowing money into this equation as an unbiased tool will only increase this inequality in the ability to spread a message.
I think we as a society should make changes so that money has as little influence as possible. Of course, that battle will never end and there will be pushback from the small minority of people of have the overwhelming amount of wealth in this world, but changes such as banning political ads in twitter is a very good start.
Similarly, if we decide that inequality in terms of being able to politically influence people is bad, and money exacerbates that inequality, then we can ban political ads. And if something else comes along that does the same thing, ban that too in a way that makes sense.
Having such a small number of people wield such huge political influence is a shame, but what is even worse is when people accept that as inevitable and perpetuates that myth.
My post was just talking about eliminating inequality. I make no claim about reducing inequality.
Removing money has been tried in places like Russia. People stop working and if they are forced will not try as hard.
Money has been part since the beginning. To vote you needed to own property which made sense because land owners paid the government in the form of taxes. Personal income taxes came after the war to pay for the war debts.
By the way every time there's an unrestrained hyper exponential curve, it leads to civil unrest pretty quickly. A lot of terrible things come in the wake of economic hardship.
> it would be natural for them to try paying for ads, and the obvious place to put ads are on social media
It would be natural to them to post to their Facebook page because that's what social media is for and then for their committed network of supporters to repost etc.
Remember - that's the advantage of social media - you can quickly get the work out to your supporters without having to go through intermediaries, or having to pay for advertising.
> you can quickly get the work out to your supporters without having to go through intermediaries, or having to pay for advertising.
How do you think Facebook makes money? And as a followup, why do you think people pay money to run ads on Facebook?
Like, I 100% agree with you that this is how it should work, and it's how we all thought it would work 15 years ago, but it feels oddly disconnected from the world we live in.
It might push the platforms to feed people with an equal share of all sides instead of feeding them what the "want" and anyone else has to pay
Take this case, for example. URL says it all: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/muslims-take-out-full-page-n...
It sounds nice to say that we are going to keep some communication channels free of political speech. It is an option. But it is possible (I claim: likely) that more communication leads to better political outcomes, so sealing off easy-to-use channels like advertising may not actually help.
Not when that speech is deceptive, and particularly not when people can pay money to a company to ensure that those lies are disseminated as widely as possible.
I believe this is true and also that this is basically the hypothesis motivating freedom of speech under law. However, I believe that modern digital political advertising is a very different kind of communication than the open, genuine discussion in a free marketplace of ideas that free speech advocates often envision.
I think one big problem is information fragmentation taken to the extreme: Each person is now subjected to his or her own individually-targeted propaganda. It is a non-genuine, abusive form of individualized communication that in my opinion tends to erode opportunity for political consensus.
In my view, some forms of political advertising are perfectly acceptable. Attending a political debate and arguing well for your candidacy is perfectly acceptable. Enlisting Cambridge Analytica or foreign intelligence services to employ individual psychometric profiles to serve up the most effectively manipulative propaganda is not acceptable.
Advertising that is more generally broadcast as opposed to narrowly targeted is perfectly acceptable, and potentially even desirable for political discourse. Advertising that is "too" targeted is potentially corrosive to political discourse. I would love to see proposals on how to draw the line, legislatively, that would address these concerns and also pass strict scrutiny.
People disseminate unpaid political messages all the time. Curated feeds or not, they are seeing things which are popular amongst them and they reshare posts they like.
You can argue that people aren't interested enough in politics, but paid ads are not a good and balanced way to get people engaged. It leads to them having an even more skewed view of politics as it biases them towards the interest of those with the most money for political ads (as opposed to what is best for their community). Those interest can align in theory, but if we are trying to select the optimal system, why add paid advertisements if we don't need to?
Please, don't use these sandboxes .. Programmers create real social media for people. Make internet great again, please.
Nitpick: IMHO, feeds aren't curated, since curation implies some kind of human judgement at the least (and preferably an expert's judgement). Feeds are algorithmically sorted. Calling them curated debases the term.
To be clear, my objection isn't to all online advertising but specifically to Zuckerberg defending Facebook's policy with an appeal to free speech. Obviously speech without funding is weak an ineffective, but if Facebook voluntarily chose to eliminate all political advertising, it is irrational to claim that your freedom of speech has been curtailed. Facebook's existence isn't promised to you.
If you aren't wielding the megaphone that is twitter/fb/youtube/whatever, then you are not going to be heard. That's just a fact at this point. Social media has in fact lowered the barrier to entry for expressing speech to large audiences, because before social media there were only newspapers and TV networks that cost significantly more and had significantly more preference towards specific agendas.
I understand the ideological desire for that not to be the case, and maybe society could stop and think how to fulfil that desire, but ignoring the facts of today is not constructive at all.
I disagree. This is only a blanket statement to be taken as fact.
Politicians have been doing town halls, focus groups, and public speeches for decades. Just because we suddenly have social media sites to project their voices to a mich larger audience doesn’t erase all of those. While spending on digital ads have gone up tremendously i’m sure, if we take them out of the equation, people will still be able to hear their candidates voices. Social media websites are not the be-all and end-all of political discourse.
I don't disagree with you! And I think if you'll look around, you'll see it is true. Your ability to get your viewpoint out is, perhaps more than at any other time since the 19th century, dependent on it being deemed acceptable by a handful of powerful gatekeepers. Between the incredible amount of consolidation we've seen in media companies, the dominance Google has on search, the dominance Apple and Google have on app stores, and the dominance a small handful of social media and messaging corporations have on communication, it's kind of amazing how few entities control what so many get to see in every context.
I really, really welcome suggestions on how to fix this. But I don't think pretending it doesn't exist is the answer.
The problem with your initial argument is that paid political ads give even more power to the gatekeepers. It also overlooked the issue that more money equals more speech, meaning grassroots political movements are at an even bigger disadvantage because of the disparity of funds than if everyone had to get their message out organically.
the is the problem with free speech, you accept you will have both and good and hopefully with a preponderance of free speech the good will out weigh the bad.
once you start trying to limit who and where you give bad speech the edge because those who set the rules also determine which is which
the real threat to free speech and democracy is from those sitting in office successfully scaring the people into letting them set limits on who can say anything and what they can say when in reality the only group that should face any such limits are those in office and those beholden to them and the party they represent.
Democracy as a system dispowers the individual (what is a single voice in a sea of milions). It is perfectly rational to not vote (your single vote would never matter, while the time it takes to go vote will).
Since most people want to spend their lives infinity-scrolling a facebook feed, and for some reason political power can be derived from these people, then facebook will have power by deciding what these people get to see, and if it's not facebook then it's twitter, or google, or the ISP, or the department of the internet, or the TV channels, so on and so forth.
only 0.1% of people care about free platform.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" has been a cliche for a long, long time, and while it is a little flip, there's a truth there. Your freedom of speech does not require me or anyone else to amplify it. Or even listen.
Put another way, do you believe you should be forced to tell other people my message? What about everyone else's?
Everything was fine back when the newspapers had a healthy tension between revenues and credibility. And when the sheer quantity of advertising venues was small and the advertisements devoid of third-order ulterior motives.
Until we can reign in the excesses of online advertising, it's more prudent to be cautious than dive further into the abyss.
Another solution would be to allow the ads but disallow personalized targeting.
- Twitter: no political ads - Facebook: any political ads, including lying.
It would be nice to at LEAST have an agreement that ads saying things that are objectively incorrect should not be run.
For example, if I ran an ad that said "Hacker News was owned by Rupert Murdock" (which is false) then this ad should be blocked.
There might need to be some penalty applied retroactively. Like if you're busted running a fake political ad your company is on timeout for 60 days.
To be fair, I realize this is a difficult problem this is why we might have to add a penalty period.
Surely we can live in a world where we have facts, right?
Then I would say you are living in artificial world delightful for advertisers. I have a Twitter account that I have not really used in a decade and nobody else in my family has ever touched Twitter. My wife has a Facebook account she uses to keep in touch with family, but nobody else in my family has a Facebook account. I know MANY people in my professional world who have neither.
To that end, I think your position is contradictory. If X group has a moral right to use their money to promote speech via ads, why shouldn't media owners have the same right to use their money to promote speech via their platforms?
obviously i don't know much about this area...if anyone has canonical references they could point to i'd love to learn more.
The game we want is one where political movements can organically gain traction based on popularity.
In this world where political ads are banned, movements don't need financiers to be as successful as they could be. In your example, it's ironic you mention the civil forfeiture movement, because they are exactly the type of people who aren't spending money on ads. PACs and Super PACs for election campaigns are doing the spending. I wish you would acknowledge this.
Yes, I don't see anything wrong with that.
If I choose to print 1,000 flyers to hand out, I am using money to amplify my voice. Do you see anything wrong with this?
Facebook Ads are no different.
If you were to buy the entire newspaper's advertising space to amplify your voice I would definitely consider it an abuse of power and wrong.
(1) Women are paid 72 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men. (2) Rich people pay less taxes than the poor. (3) Blacks are being wantonly killed by the police in large numbers.
However, I think that in a free country, progressives can make ads with such messages, and conservatives are free to debunk them. Likewise, progressives can debunk misleading statements by conservatives.
In phony Facebook ad, Warren said most TV networks will refuse ads with a 'lie' but that’s wrong https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...
'Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934 states:
"If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station: Provided, That such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast under the provision of this section."
It also specifically says licensees can’t censor "material broadcast by any such candidate."
Broadcasters are bound by that act and therefore can’t reject a presidential candidate’s ad, even if contains false information. (The candidates do have to abide by disclosure rules to make it clear who paid for the ad.)'
If, let's say, a group advocating for the abolishment of asset forfeiture wants to communicate their message, and the media is not covering it, it would be natural for them to try paying for ads, and the obvious place to put ads are on social media, since that's where the eyeballs are (cf, the collapse of the news media). If social media bans those ads then while the group clearly still has free speech, they will have little way to meaningfully exercise it.
You might say - and I'd certainly agree - that the real problem is a world where everyone is on Twitter and Facebook to the exclusion of all else, and thus a world where 3-4 CEOs can unilaterally decide that nobody needs to hear anything about asset forfeiture (or whatever). And yet, that's the world we're in.
(You also don't seem to understand what "free speech" is. By your logic, a law banning the purchase television ads for Democratic candidates - but allowing the purchase of television ads for Republicans - would be okay, because after all, those ads cost money, so it's not restricting the Democratic candidates right to free speech. That's absurd, no?)