Nearly everyone agrees that political ads that lie are problematic. We the people think Facebook should do something about that. If they're unwilling to regulate themselves then we'll regulate it for them.
This can range from putting guidelines all the way to breaking Facebook apart.
It's Facebook's decision what they want their future to be.
But back the "punting" metaphor -- he only has the ball because the US government never picked it up. Doesn't it seem pretty clear that these standards (re: hate speech, election ads, etc.) should be made at a national level, rather than a FB level?
Therefore - at least in the US - no, based on the 1stA and the reasoning leading to it in the first place.
One argument I heard that cuts to the heart of why I think this is a cynical partisan move: the same publications and media outlets pushing for and celebrating the removing of political ads from social media are the same ones who are running those ads in their own outlets. This means that the issue isn't over ads themselves, but over who has control over the ads.
I don’t know where you get “nearly everyone” agrees that political ads that lie are problematic.
Today there was a funny Snopes fact check of a meme saying Democrats have tried to impeach every Republican President since Eisenhower. [1]
Turns out Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment on every elected Republican President since Eisenhower (Ford was not elected, he was appointed after Nixon’s VP resigned). Snopes rated the meme “Mostly False”.
You can deconstruct the “Biden Corruption” ad that Trump ran against Biden which CNN refused to run and find it contains only factual statements presented in an arguably misleading way.
The only fact I know is that the best political ads will present an opponent in the worse possible light using their own words to do it. As Joe Biden says in the Trump ad, “well, son of a bitch!”
Facebook is absolutely the last entity on Earth I would want to be censoring political ads in a critically important channel.
The idea that the Federal government should be in the business of threatening Facebook with obliteration because of political ads they don’t refuse to run — luckily there’s an Amendment to the Bill of Rights people should double-check.
[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...
And "we the people" wanted internment camps for the Japanese, and believed in the racist philosophy of Manifest Destiny, so maybe "we the people" shouldn't be in charge...
So you don't think we should allow certain lies? We'd still be creating a list of lies that people can't tell, just a smaller one.
You're still advocating for banning lies in political advertising, but only if you agree with what is banned.
The whole point is a discourse, congress isn't a separate entity from the population.
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."
so at least in the past the government decided tv stations can not censor.
I know FB is not a TV station but it's probably the closest applicable law ATM.
Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act is not an applicable law because Facebook is not an FCC licensee, nor does it need a license to operate.
Also, it’s been challenged as a violation of the First Amendment and the courts have removed almost all of its teeth. Section 315 is practically dead law.
The issue is in some cases “they” (FANNG, Reddit, Twitter, etc) want to be platforms like Facebook saying ads aren’t their responsibility, and in some cases are acting as publishers by censoring otherwise legal content they do not like or agree with. There are memes that will get you instantly suspended from Facebook, while you and Facebook argue no one could possibly monitor content!
It shouldn’t be that the giants get to be both. Legally they are provided protections against content on their system - but historically this only applies to platforms where the content is entirely unfiltered. Think if your telco cut the call when you said the words “Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself” as a fictitious example, they shouldn’t get liability protection for things people say if they’re going to curate the content like that.
They don't care about free speech or cooperating with one of the biggest enemy of Free Speech in the world (China) when there is potential revenue to be made.
here we are, 3 years later. It sounds to me like FB discusses the idea and never implemented it. I’m not sure we can fault a company for exploring contingency plans with China...
Forcing sites to have a completely laissez-faire approach to user generated content seems to avoid liability for that user content seems like something that would destroy the internet. Like why would YC take on that risk to help us maintain a space free of spam or threats of violence?
I too remember "the destroyed" internet of yesteryear. We're in a much better place now that 5 companies control your opinion and your access to counter opinions.
>Like why would YC take on that risk to help us maintain a space free of spam or threats of violence?
No. We're talking about legal things that the PUBLISHER just doesn't like. Illegal things are always on the table for moderation. Don't try and make the argument about spam. You know very well that the issue here is a room of "content curators" artificially removing "trending" things because of political ideology, or government requested censorship, or just whoever bought the most ads that month.
The trolls placing the ads already know they're lying, so I'm not sure how that helps. Facebook also knows they're lying.
The question is whether Facebook's right to make money from lies weighs more than the right of its users to not be manipulated by propagandists.
It's not a super easy question in the abstract because of the weight we give in the US to freedom of speech. But we also give a lot of weight to fair elections, and people have seen the real damage the current policy has caused. For that reason the discussion is more nuanced than it used to be.
Its up to Advertiser to make certain they are Not lying, Not the publication. Is FB now supposed to verify Every Single Ingredient in a Can of Spam before they let them advertise a Spam Taco... imho, it's absurd.