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A post from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985 A user who works in digital advertising

A post from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985 A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following: > You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple. Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.

mdorazio 7y ago
That's a good system, but I'm not sure it's actually workable at the scale of Twitter or Facebook's ad platforms. That's a a lot of human review.
- tyre 7y ago
  Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible. Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
  - xenomachina 7y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable. Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm". Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
    - JaRail 7y ago
      Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves. Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
- mbesto 7y ago
  It's almost as if those companies shouldn't be operating at the margins that they currently do...
- Traster 7y ago
  Well, twitter makes let's say $1Bn per year, so they could spend 15000 man years per year and still be breaking even.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    You have not justified that 15000 people is enough to moderate all the content.
- nickfromseattle 7y ago
  A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content. For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0] No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content. Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges. There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page. It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction. I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most. Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it? [0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840 https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840
slg 7y ago
So does that mean some group like the American Cancer Society can't advertise?
- tyre 7y ago
  Sounds like the American Cancer Society can advocate for itself but not for candidates or policies. Fine: Donate to fight cancer Not fine: Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research
  - bhupy 7y ago
    How about ACLU or Planned Parenthood?
    - wavefunction 7y ago
      Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        Both organizations have PACs. Their PACs should be covered by any ban on political advertising.
      - bhupy 7y ago
        I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal. I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
      - drak0n1c 7y ago
        If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.
roywiggins 7y ago
Not to mention explicitly political merchandise, #resistance shirts, Don't Tread On Me flags, bumper stickers, QAnon coffee mugs...
AmericanChopper 7y ago
The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.

mdorazio 7y ago

That's a good system, but I'm not sure it's actually workable at the scale of Twitter or Facebook's ad platforms. That's a a lot of human review.

tyre 7y ago
Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible. Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
- xenomachina 7y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable. Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm". Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
  - JaRail 7y ago
    Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves. Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
mbesto 7y ago
It's almost as if those companies shouldn't be operating at the margins that they currently do...
Traster 7y ago
Well, twitter makes let's say $1Bn per year, so they could spend 15000 man years per year and still be breaking even.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  You have not justified that 15000 people is enough to moderate all the content.
nickfromseattle 7y ago
A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content. For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0] No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content. Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges. There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page. It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction. I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most. Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it? [0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840 https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840

slg 7y ago

So does that mean some group like the American Cancer Society can't advertise?

tyre 7y ago
Sounds like the American Cancer Society can advocate for itself but not for candidates or policies. Fine: Donate to fight cancer Not fine: Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research
- bhupy 7y ago
  How about ACLU or Planned Parenthood?
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      Both organizations have PACs. Their PACs should be covered by any ban on political advertising.
    - bhupy 7y ago
      I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal. I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
    - drak0n1c 7y ago
      If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.

roywiggins 7y ago

Not to mention explicitly political merchandise, #resistance shirts, Don't Tread On Me flags, bumper stickers, QAnon coffee mugs...

AmericanChopper 7y ago

The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.