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McCain wants to Regulate Facebook
- tooltalk 9y agothe senile kook is at it again.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sp332 9y agoThe summary at least looks good. There's no reason online ads shouldn't be regulated just like every other kind of ad. And pushing for more transparency is a good sign.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoSure there's a reason. It imposes a burden on anybody offering communications infrastructure online.
- sp332 9y agoIt only applies to people selling ads. And transparency around an election seems like enough reason to at least make the records public, which doesn't seem like a very high hurdle.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoSo, any business that offers free communications infrastructure, like reddit and other forums. You need manual ad curation to identify political ads, or you have fines that you might have to pay.
- sp332 9y agoOr you have a button that says "Click here to verify that you're not buying a political ad". Ass covered.
- Eridrus 9y ago> There's no reason online ads shouldn't be regulated just like every other kind of ad The only things currently regulated like this are "broadcast television, radio, cable and satellite communications"; this doesn't apply to mail advertising which as recently as 2012 people were pointing to as very targeted and having it's own transparency issues. But politicians haven't been super keen to spend tax dollars on dealing with the issues there. And the proposed regulation doesn't apply to small entities (reported elsewhere), because it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is a burden. And we have no actual evidence saying this would have prevented anything. The "Islamic Republic of France" ad that got some news traction recently isn't really any more unhinged than what Trump said on national TV. Axios is right that tech companies will probably go along with it because this is not the environment to fight this sort of things, but this is not objectively good legislation.
- sp332 9y agoThis is mostly about increasing transparency. It's not (yet) about implementing regulations because we don't even know what kind of problem we're facing yet. This is basic stuff, it's like step zero before we can start to address the problem.
- Eridrus 9y agoThis is regulation. Someone has to extend the effort to figure out which ads were political or not.