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.
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.