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I think there's a mixup in this conversation going on. I thought the question was whether or not Facebook could determine whether a post was political in natur

I think there's a mixup in this conversation going on. I thought the question was whether or not Facebook could determine whether a post was political in nature or not (biasing on the side of "it is") and refusing to accept money in exchange for distributing it. Never was this thread about Facebook's role as an arbiter of "truth." The difficulty of that is much, much higher, and one that I agree shouldn't be entrusted to Facebook (or probably to any single entity, for that matter). Again, this is not about whether people should be allowed to post their opinions on Facebook. It's really about whether Facebook should be used to amplify political speech; and also (secondarily), if they are used this way, whether they should allow advertisers to narrowly target political speech to audiences. With respect to your "gay rights" fringe argument, I see no difference in how that viewpoint (as formerly a fringe view) would be treated from a then-mainstream viewpoint under a broad rule like this. Neither pro- nor anti- rights messages would qualify for amplification. BTW, there's a great discussion with Alex Stamos (former CSO at Facebook) in which he discusses it with more nuance and detail, but tries to thread the needle more than I feel comfortable doing: https://galley.cjr.org/public/conversations/-LsHiyaqX4DpgKDqf9Mj https://galley.cjr.org/public/conversations/-LsHiyaqX4DpgKDq...

AmericanChopper 7y ago
The whole issue seems to be based around making judgements about the truth to me. The initial problem is that political ads are high risk for distribution of false or deceptive information. Fact checking them is too fraught with issues, so you just decide to ban them all instead. Now you’ve just kicked the can down the road a bit and narrowed your search of truth to “is this political or non-political”. > It's really about whether Facebook should be used to amplify political speech Which I would assert that any attempt to control would require FB to make value judgements about said speech, naturally resulting in FB enforcing some particular set of values. I would say that FB and other big tech firms have been following a trend that’s been seen in government a lot in recent times. Identify some threat to public wellbeing (in terms of government the canonical example would be terrorism), and leverage it to gain more power and influence. It’s no secret that society generally walks away from a terrorist attack with less freedom than it had before. For the big tech firms the threat has been “fake news” or “misinformation”, and they’ve been pretty consistent with the response of “we need to exert more control over the flow of information and public discourse to combat this”. Putting aside any debate about whether they should be allowed to do this, I think it’s overall a harmful outcome for society, and I’m surprised that FB hasn’t taken the same approach in this case.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

The whole issue seems to be based around making judgements about the truth to me. The initial problem is that political ads are high risk for distribution of false or deceptive information. Fact checking them is too fraught with issues, so you just decide to ban them all instead. Now you’ve just kicked the can down the road a bit and narrowed your search of truth to “is this political or non-political”. > It's really about whether Facebook should be used to amplify political speech Which I would assert that any attempt to control would require FB to make value judgements about said speech, naturally resulting in FB enforcing some particular set of values. I would say that FB and other big tech firms have been following a trend that’s been seen in government a lot in recent times. Identify some threat to public wellbeing (in terms of government the canonical example would be terrorism), and leverage it to gain more power and influence. It’s no secret that society generally walks away from a terrorist attack with less freedom than it had before. For the big tech firms the threat has been “fake news” or “misinformation”, and they’ve been pretty consistent with the response of “we need to exert more control over the flow of information and public discourse to combat this”. Putting aside any debate about whether they should be allowed to do this, I think it’s overall a harmful outcome for society, and I’m surprised that FB hasn’t taken the same approach in this case.