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You're mistaken. I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. Do you think you should have the right to read my texts? Should advertis

You're mistaken. I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. Do you think you should have the right to read my texts? Should advertisers be required to disclose to you that they texted me? The status quo outside FB is not newspapers, it's other web ads, television, sms, and phone calls. FB may be more or less transparent, but the status quo is not transparent in the way you're describing.

paganel 6y ago
> I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. There should be a law against that.
- smaryjerry 6y ago
  I thought there was for mobile phones? I receive unsolicited calls and texts from the same orgs even though I tell them over the phone to stop calling and remove me from your list. It is simple telemarketing. The calls and texts have to be illegal because it is only fake IRS calls and political organizations that Ive never heard of or signed up for. If it were legal I would think I would be receiving them for all kinds of products.
im3w1l 6y ago
These people are voluntarily sharing the ads they see with researchers. It's a completely different situation.
willvarfar 6y ago
You pay your phone company for service. They also mine and sell your activity. Recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. Do you think you should have the right to read my texts? Should advertisers be required to disclose to you that they texted me? The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting. I have bought voter rolls for direct mail campaigns. On the mailer, I had to disclose who was paying for it. I knew a fraction of my mailers would end up in the opposition’s hands, just as their messaging ended up in mine, and that from who got which mailers we could deduce which voter roll query was used. If I lied they would call me out to the people I lied to. That is an incentive to stay honest and a promoter of a common fact base. Direct mail, SMS and phone outreach has gotten more targeted. But it’s nowhere close to Facebook. That deserves elevated transparency to a regulatory force. Given these are political ads government regulation is out of the question. So the next best options are total public disclosure, adversarial disclosure (i.e. someone identifying the opposition, which is complicated, and giving them full transparency) or mandatory or voluntary disclosure to academia. The last is the weakest since it introduces sampling biases and requires private collection resources. But it’s better than nothing. Facebook still fights it. American politics are no longer a debate. We can’t agree on common facts and can’t agree on a common set of institutions. Broad political interaction has devolved into a competition of facts over one of governing philosophies. That is not a way to govern and is a direct result of social media promoting separate, targeted “facts” that spread faster and more insidiously than they can be countered. If we want to continue making decisions as a democracy, this has to be checked. This has precedent. Every new form of media (print, radio, broadcast television, phone, cable television, e-mail, et cetera) has been followed by new rules for political discourse. To inform that rule making we need research. If the media controls the data the research will be useless, the rules garbage and our discourse corrupted.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  > The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting. FB gives off serious Emil Kaschub vibes with its willingness to run non-consensual psychological experiments on people.
- zigzaggy 6y ago
  Great comment, thanks for sharing your info and ideas. I’m inferring from your second to last paragraph that you’re alluding to social media being somehow part (or all?) of the reason for those problems. I totally agree. I think that we as a nation (US) (and possibly all over world) have a blind spot where social media, surveillance capitalism, and targeted ads are. The power of the algorithm is so strong that people truly believe they’re being recorded (the whole FB is listening because I got such and such ad). Policy is always many years behind technology. My biggest concern is that this technology poses an existential threat to our current zeitgeist (?). I always trouble putting the threat into my own words. But I can’t agree more. We need immediate transparency. And we need to study the cause and effect so we can better understand. That will lead to the best form of whatever regulation we may need to move to the next stage.

paganel 6y ago

> I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. There should be a law against that.

smaryjerry 6y ago
I thought there was for mobile phones? I receive unsolicited calls and texts from the same orgs even though I tell them over the phone to stop calling and remove me from your list. It is simple telemarketing. The calls and texts have to be illegal because it is only fake IRS calls and political organizations that Ive never heard of or signed up for. If it were legal I would think I would be receiving them for all kinds of products.

im3w1l 6y ago

These people are voluntarily sharing the ads they see with researchers. It's a completely different situation.

willvarfar 6y ago

You pay your phone company for service. They also mine and sell your activity. Recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> I have received >20 political advertisements via SMS in the last week. Do you think you should have the right to read my texts? Should advertisers be required to disclose to you that they texted me? The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting. I have bought voter rolls for direct mail campaigns. On the mailer, I had to disclose who was paying for it. I knew a fraction of my mailers would end up in the opposition’s hands, just as their messaging ended up in mine, and that from who got which mailers we could deduce which voter roll query was used. If I lied they would call me out to the people I lied to. That is an incentive to stay honest and a promoter of a common fact base. Direct mail, SMS and phone outreach has gotten more targeted. But it’s nowhere close to Facebook. That deserves elevated transparency to a regulatory force. Given these are political ads government regulation is out of the question. So the next best options are total public disclosure, adversarial disclosure (i.e. someone identifying the opposition, which is complicated, and giving them full transparency) or mandatory or voluntary disclosure to academia. The last is the weakest since it introduces sampling biases and requires private collection resources. But it’s better than nothing. Facebook still fights it. American politics are no longer a debate. We can’t agree on common facts and can’t agree on a common set of institutions. Broad political interaction has devolved into a competition of facts over one of governing philosophies. That is not a way to govern and is a direct result of social media promoting separate, targeted “facts” that spread faster and more insidiously than they can be countered. If we want to continue making decisions as a democracy, this has to be checked. This has precedent. Every new form of media (print, radio, broadcast television, phone, cable television, e-mail, et cetera) has been followed by new rules for political discourse. To inform that rule making we need research. If the media controls the data the research will be useless, the rules garbage and our discourse corrupted.

rmrfstar 6y ago
> The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting. FB gives off serious Emil Kaschub vibes with its willingness to run non-consensual psychological experiments on people.
zigzaggy 6y ago
Great comment, thanks for sharing your info and ideas. I’m inferring from your second to last paragraph that you’re alluding to social media being somehow part (or all?) of the reason for those problems. I totally agree. I think that we as a nation (US) (and possibly all over world) have a blind spot where social media, surveillance capitalism, and targeted ads are. The power of the algorithm is so strong that people truly believe they’re being recorded (the whole FB is listening because I got such and such ad). Policy is always many years behind technology. My biggest concern is that this technology poses an existential threat to our current zeitgeist (?). I always trouble putting the threat into my own words. But I can’t agree more. We need immediate transparency. And we need to study the cause and effect so we can better understand. That will lead to the best form of whatever regulation we may need to move to the next stage.