6 ms·

Who is fact-checking political ads on television or in newspapers? Who is fact checking "opinion" shows on cable news that present overtly biased and occasional

by imgabe 7y ago

Who is fact-checking political ads on television or in newspapers? Who is fact checking "opinion" shows on cable news that present overtly biased and occasionally outright false information? The implication in this debate is that the "wrong" candidate only got elected because some voters had bad information and were tricked. Maybe parties need to look at what they are offering voters and what they have actually delivered in the past to get to the root of why people either don't want what they're offering or don't believe it will actually come to pass.

Mangalor 7y ago
Facebook actively facilitated suppressing black voters in 2016. They were literally tricked, yes. https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/report-finds-black-voters-were-main-target-of-russias-2016-campaign/ https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/report-finds-black-voters-were...
- imgabe 7y ago
  By "actively facilitated" you mean they have tools for targeting ads by demographic factors such as race and someone used those tools? Or are you alleging that there were Facebook employees saying "We don't want black people to vote" and those employees manually took steps to make that happen? Because the article does not support the latter.
  - themagician 7y ago
    Someone approved those ads.
    - imgabe 7y ago
      Does Facebook have people manually reviewing and approving each ad? That doesn't seem feasible. Regardless it's not like the ads were overt: > Posts with titles like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton” and “A Vote for Jill Stein is Not a Wasted Vote” were specifically aimed at black voters, the report says. It does not seem outside the realm of reason that ads advocating for or against an individual candidate, or even questioning the legitimacy of the system would be legitimate Is there a good reason a reviewer should prohibit ads advocating against a candidate? I mean a reason other than "but I like that candidate".
      - Mangalor 7y ago
        Well sounds like you're trying to legitimize Russian disinformation campaigns, tbh.
        imgabe 7y ago
        Well, sounds like you're trying to abolish free speech whenever it doesn't agree with your politics, tbh. Honestly, what is your preferred outcome here? What person or group of people do you want to decide which information is "valid" and what opinions people are allowed to hear? It's not an easy or trivial problem. You're practically saying any ad that during 2016 that said "Don't vote for Hillary Clinton" was an obvious Russian troll that should have been suppressed. Is that what you want?
        themagician 7y ago
        That's not what free speech is.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        "Don't vote for $candidate", "$candidate is bad" and "$other_candidate isn't as bad as you think" are all fundamental parts of free speech. How could they be otherwise?
        themagician 7y ago
        No, they aren’t. That’s not what free speech is… at all. The right to free speech is the right to say something without the government using force or violence to silence you. That’s it. That’s all it is. That’s what it means.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        You seem to be confusing the first amendment with free speech as a concept, but that's depressingly common. Free speech is the natural right to communication; the first amendment is the US government's recognition of that right. And you're right, if Facebook is exercising their own speech rights, they don't have to relay the speech of others. But that doesn't mean that that refusal doesn't go against the concept and general principle in question.
jlwits 7y ago
The issue with fact-checking Facebook ads vs. TV or newspaper is one of targeting and timing. Facebook ads can be micro-targeted to the point where they're only seen by a very small audience, which is simply not possible in mainstream TV or newspaper. If you have a misleading campaign on TV (e.g., swift boat stuff on Kerry in '04), that can be recognized and called out (not that the dems were super effective at that then...). However with Facebook, it's much more challenging given the small sample size to (1) see all of the ads people are seeing and (2) figure out who has been exposed to them. So at the end of the day, it's tougher to identify misinformation, and then if you do identify it it's pretty much impossible to re-message the same audience with the correct info. Add timing to that (many campaigns are only up for 24-48 hours) and you start to see why this is a fundamentally different beast from TV and newspaper ads. One of the blunter but potentially effective solutions is to have a much larger minimum audience size, which is what Google moved to (although still at a pretty small scale).
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Not to mention that Facebook for some time also enabled resharing those micro-targeted ads, which would then show those ads on friends/followers' newsfeed without the Sponsored Content notice, thus further blurring the lines between what was "legitimately" viral content and what originated as micro-targeted paid advertising.
- jstrong 7y ago
  in my mind, the facebook policy is limited in ways that mitigate the problems you present. the "hands off" policy (as I understand it) only applies to elected officials, meaning there is some level of inherent accountability (in significant part due to legal requirements to disclose the source of campaign ads), and a built-in limit to how 'fringe' the information will be (since an elected official, having been elected, has some amount of public support). A relatively small number of actors with established political support, who are generally under high levels of scrutiny and accountability for the things they say, ads they run, etc., are subject to the policy, not everyone.

by imgabe 7y ago

Mangalor 7y ago

Facebook actively facilitated suppressing black voters in 2016. They were literally tricked, yes. https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/report-finds-black-voters-were-main-target-of-russias-2016-campaign/ https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/report-finds-black-voters-were...

imgabe 7y ago
By "actively facilitated" you mean they have tools for targeting ads by demographic factors such as race and someone used those tools? Or are you alleging that there were Facebook employees saying "We don't want black people to vote" and those employees manually took steps to make that happen? Because the article does not support the latter.
- themagician 7y ago
  Someone approved those ads.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    Does Facebook have people manually reviewing and approving each ad? That doesn't seem feasible. Regardless it's not like the ads were overt: > Posts with titles like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton” and “A Vote for Jill Stein is Not a Wasted Vote” were specifically aimed at black voters, the report says. It does not seem outside the realm of reason that ads advocating for or against an individual candidate, or even questioning the legitimacy of the system would be legitimate Is there a good reason a reviewer should prohibit ads advocating against a candidate? I mean a reason other than "but I like that candidate".
    - Mangalor 7y ago
      Well sounds like you're trying to legitimize Russian disinformation campaigns, tbh.
      - imgabe 7y ago
        Well, sounds like you're trying to abolish free speech whenever it doesn't agree with your politics, tbh. Honestly, what is your preferred outcome here? What person or group of people do you want to decide which information is "valid" and what opinions people are allowed to hear? It's not an easy or trivial problem. You're practically saying any ad that during 2016 that said "Don't vote for Hillary Clinton" was an obvious Russian troll that should have been suppressed. Is that what you want?
        themagician 7y ago
        That's not what free speech is.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        "Don't vote for $candidate", "$candidate is bad" and "$other_candidate isn't as bad as you think" are all fundamental parts of free speech. How could they be otherwise?
        themagician 7y ago
        No, they aren’t. That’s not what free speech is… at all. The right to free speech is the right to say something without the government using force or violence to silence you. That’s it. That’s all it is. That’s what it means.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        You seem to be confusing the first amendment with free speech as a concept, but that's depressingly common. Free speech is the natural right to communication; the first amendment is the US government's recognition of that right. And you're right, if Facebook is exercising their own speech rights, they don't have to relay the speech of others. But that doesn't mean that that refusal doesn't go against the concept and general principle in question.

jlwits 7y ago

The issue with fact-checking Facebook ads vs. TV or newspaper is one of targeting and timing. Facebook ads can be micro-targeted to the point where they're only seen by a very small audience, which is simply not possible in mainstream TV or newspaper. If you have a misleading campaign on TV (e.g., swift boat stuff on Kerry in '04), that can be recognized and called out (not that the dems were super effective at that then...). However with Facebook, it's much more challenging given the small sample size to (1) see all of the ads people are seeing and (2) figure out who has been exposed to them. So at the end of the day, it's tougher to identify misinformation, and then if you do identify it it's pretty much impossible to re-message the same audience with the correct info. Add timing to that (many campaigns are only up for 24-48 hours) and you start to see why this is a fundamentally different beast from TV and newspaper ads. One of the blunter but potentially effective solutions is to have a much larger minimum audience size, which is what Google moved to (although still at a pretty small scale).

WorldMaker 7y ago
Not to mention that Facebook for some time also enabled resharing those micro-targeted ads, which would then show those ads on friends/followers' newsfeed without the Sponsored Content notice, thus further blurring the lines between what was "legitimately" viral content and what originated as micro-targeted paid advertising.
jstrong 7y ago
in my mind, the facebook policy is limited in ways that mitigate the problems you present. the "hands off" policy (as I understand it) only applies to elected officials, meaning there is some level of inherent accountability (in significant part due to legal requirements to disclose the source of campaign ads), and a built-in limit to how 'fringe' the information will be (since an elected official, having been elected, has some amount of public support). A relatively small number of actors with established political support, who are generally under high levels of scrutiny and accountability for the things they say, ads they run, etc., are subject to the policy, not everyone.