Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
from the again-and-again dept
I’ve made it clear that I don’t think much of Elizabeth Warren’s big plan to “break up big tech,” which seemed not particularly well thought out and unlikely to accomplish its actual goals. Even so, I certainly cringed upon hearing the news that Facebook had blocked an ad that Warren’s team had taken to promote the plan. I mean, come on. Here is Warren, talking about how Facebook is too powerful and can potentially influence policy by choosing what it allows and what it doesn’t allow… and Facebook up and hands Warren the most beautiful gift she could ever hope for: blocking her own ad for her policy to break up Facebook. Basically everyone immediately spun the story as Facebook trying to censor this call to break up itself.
It sure looked bad.
Of course, the reality, again, is a lot more nuanced. And, while everyone will ignore this (and I’m sure some people will make bogus accusations in the comments), the reality is that this isn’t proof of Facebook’s nefarious attempts to censor people it doesn’t like or messages it doesn’t like. It’s proof of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. As Facebook explained, the original ad violated a Facebook policy that had nothing to do with the message it was sending: you’re apparently not allowed to use Facebook’s logo in an ad:
?We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo,” the spokesperson said. “In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.?
This is, indeed, true. If you look at Facebook’s ad policies it shows the following:
You are, in fact, not allowed to use a Facebook logo in an ad. Warren’s ad violated that. Of course, in this context, it looks really, really bad. As Buzzfeed’s Ryan Mac noted, this policy — “which was ostensibly put in place for good reason, is interpreted without nuance.”
Yup. Except, here’s the thing, as we discussed on our podcast last year, it is literally impossible to invoke nuance when discussing moderation of content at scale. To handle the kind of scale that Facebook and other giant platforms deal with, you need to have thousands (and maybe tens of thousands) of content moderators, and they need to be trained in a manner that they will apply the same rules pretty consistently (which is already an impossible standard). In such a world, there is literally no room for nuance. A system that allows nuance is one that allows arbitrary decision making… leading to just more complaints of inconsistent content moderation.
And, frankly, for all of Warren’s attempt to frame this as evidence that Facebook has “too much power” and is “dominated by a single censor,” what actually played out suggests why that’s inaccurate. These ads weren’t getting much attention. Indeed, they had almost no money behind them. According to Buzzfeed, these ads weren’t designed to reach a wide audience:
Facebook?s ad archive shows that the four ads had less than $100 in backing each, with three garnering fewer than 1,000 impressions and one garnering between 1,000 and 5,000 impressions.
And then what happened? The ads got taken down, and rather being “censored,” the story went crazy viral through other sources, almost as if the Warren campaign maybe found some silly rule to violate just to make this kind of thing happen…. And, of course, the Streisand Effect then guaranteed that for basically a tiny ad spend, a ton more people now became aware of these ads.
I fully expect that the details and nuance here will be ignored by most — and we’ll keep hearing for months (or, possibly, years) about how this somehow “proves” Facebook either “censors critics” or is too dominant and can stifle a message. And, yet, all of the details show something very, very different. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and when Facebook does (for totally different reasons) try to stifle a message (after receiving tons of pressure from people like Elizabeth Warren to better police political ads…), it suddenly became headline news across the political and tech news realms.
Again, there are all sorts of reasons to be concerned about Facebook’s market position. And I’d love to see more competition in the market. But, can we at least not jump on the easy narrative when it’s wrong, even if it “feels” good?
Filed Under: advertisements, antitrust, censorship, content moderation, elizabeth warren, logos, message, policies, power
Companies: facebook
Comments on “Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads”
You keep making this point–and I agree, it’s true–but you never draw any conclusions from it.
Content moderation at scale is impossible, and therefore… what should happen?
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Everything in my previous post about moving to a world of protocols, not platforms, and pushing the power out to the ends of the network. Let everyone be able to curate their own experience, or adapt any third parties’ curation…
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All right. That sounds nice, but… when has it ever happened in reality? Human nature simply doesn’t work that way. Social systems have always tended towards centralization over time, because as a whole we find that the benefits of centralization outweigh the benefits of decentralization.
Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to devote towards "curating their own experience," which means they’d be driven to adapt third parties’ curations, and those third parties would inevitably consolidate, and within 10 years (at the very most; likely far less) we’d be essentially back where we started, with two or three centralized massive curation systems that everyone’s using, all having the same problems of moderation at scale.
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Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to devote towards "curating their own experience," which means they’d be driven to adapt third parties’ curations, and those third parties would inevitably consolidate, and within 10 years (at the very most; likely far less) we’d be essentially back where we started, with two or three centralized massive curation systems that everyone’s using, all having the same problems of moderation at scale.
Why hasn’t that happened with email, then?
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The centralization part has definitely happened. Everyone these days is on email run by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. The curation and moderation problem hasn’t because it doesn’t apply, as email isn’t a social network. (I suppose you could make the case that spam is an analogous issue, but the major email providers all have their own spam "moderation" systems.)
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"Everyone" is not on those platforms. Yes, they are the three dominant webmail providers. Meanwhile, there are many others, and people do use them. Additionally, virtually everyone who works in an office has a work email run on a private server. Most contractors in all sorts of industries have their own web hosts with their own email accounts. Lots of people maintain a secondary account on a lesser service for alternative purposes of one kind or another (or more than just two). Also, all those things are interoperable, because of open protocols – you can quickly and easily set up Gmail to check your Outlook account, or vice versa, or check both via your desktop email client that also checks your work email, or check your work email via your Gmail, or… that’s the beauty of protocols! Nobody feels particularly trapped by their email provider OR their email software/web interface, or unable to move to a different one or incorporate another one into their workflow.
It seems like you want to say that if there is any semblance of someone winning in a market – even, say, a few large providers that make more money than hundreds of totally sustainable smaller ones – then that’s the same as it being "centralized" or "monopolized". It’s really not.
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Yes, and I was including that in my statement. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Every office I’ve ever worked at, the work email ran on Outlook, which is run by Microsoft. I’m aware of a few competitors in that space, but the only one I know of that has gotten any traction comes from…
…wait for it…
Google!
Re: Re: Re:5 Client =/= Hosting
Outlook is an email client. Google doesn’t have a desktop email client.
Outlook also supports a variety of Microsoft branded email hosting services, like Exchange or Office 365, to which google does produce a competitor (albeit via a web browser) in Gmail. But most businesses I work with use neither Google or Microsoft email hosting, going with services provided by their domain provider or a bespoke solution.
Most offices use Outlook because it is free with the bundle of office products they feel they need, ie Microsoft Office. Most large companies than also require universal use of specific programs rather than allow individuals to install their preferred applications. This leads to a homogeneous client environment in big business. But notably, it does not mean there is not competition for email hosting, which was kind of the point of the solution Mike suggests in the social media space, though reversed. Even if everyone is on the same protocol, lots of competition could happen on the client side, improving the user experience. Its how IRC and Usenet worked, and it worked well.
Re: Re: Re:6 Client =/= Hosting
Outlook is an email client. Google doesn’t have a desktop email client.
It goes beyond even that, really. Outlook(.com) is also an email provider – you can get an Outlook account that is an email address @outlook.com with storage etc. And you can access it via the Outlook.com web client, or via the Outlook desktop client, or via a different web or desktop client
Google doesn’t have a desktop client, but Gmail is still both a service and client. They are united in the sense that you can’t sign up for just one or the other – you always get both – but once you’ve signed up and quickly set it up, you can never open Gmail.com again and do everything from another client, or you can never send an email through your Gmail address and can solely use the web client for accessing other email accounts.
Everything works with everything in a pretty much entirely seamless manner, and it’s great.
Re: Re: Re:7 Client =/= Hosting
Outlook.com would fall under the header of Microsoft branded email hosting.
When someone says the work email ran on Outlook, I will assume that he is referring to the desktop application, not that every office he ever worked at used Outlook.com for business email hosting. He may be saying that, but without clarity, I’ll assume he means the far more well known Outlook email client, for which Gmail’s web interface is a marginal competitor, but most people aren’t aware you can use Gmail for anything other than a Gmail account.
Contrastingly, every mail provider, including outlook.com, I worked with in the last 15 years provided a web mail portal. Gmail is unique in that it expects you to actually use it as part of Google’s attempt to replace desktop office apps with a web-based app suite (whatever they call it now) and so it feels as slick and functional as a desktop client. But the use cases only overlap, not actually replace each other.
Re: Re: Re:8 Client =/= Hosting
Yup, I’m not disagreeing with you. The beauty of the protocol is that all these companies are free to do all this stuff, and try all sorts of different models of offering combinations of clients and hosting, without anyone ever being locked into anything and without any interoperability problems.
Re: Re: Re:9 Client =/= Hosting
But that’s my point. Even with an open protocol, business email still all managed by Microsoft’s Outlook system. Centralization happened anyway.
Re: Re: Re:10 Client =/= Hosting
You are so cavalier with the word "all"
Re: Re: Re:11 Client =/= Hosting
Yes, obviously some minor outliers do exist. But they’re statistically insignificant enough to disregard when talking about the big picture. If someone refers to "all" or "none" in a discussion like this, it should properly be understood as including the words "within epsilon."
Re: Re: Re:12 Client =/= Hosting
Some 80% of businesses in the most recent survey I can find still use internal email servers, in most cases some sort of legacy system. The remaining 20% are now using cloud-based hosted email services. That is an ongoing shift, btw – the numbers shift in favour of hosted services every year. In the hosted market, Microsoft isn’t even the leader – it’s well behind Google, which is in front (followed by MS and GoDaddy), but no provider has more than about a 30% market share. In the 80% using internal email servers, it looks like when last surveyed Microsoft Exchange had about a 90% market share. That has most likely gone down a bit but they are still clearly a leader in that segment of the market.
And when you look at Email as a whole, Microsoft is only #5 for email client market share (well behind Apple, which is barely represented on the business side) and for platform provision is only #3 (behind Yahoo, again not represented on the business side). There are huge age divisions too – most Outlook.com users are over 50, while most Gmail users are under 35, suggesting these rankings are going to continue shifting over time.
That sounds to me like a healthy, competitive market with different (and changing) leaders in different segments. Your attempt to reduce it to one monopoly and then "statistically insignificant" outliers just doesn’t hold up. You seem to think that if any company becomes a leader, for any amount of time, in any subsector of any industry, it means it’s a monopoly and centralization has won. Bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:13 Client =/= Hosting
I didn’t say anything about monopolies here; please stop misrepresenting me. What I said was that it’s human nature that large numbers of small groups will consolidate and centralize into small numbers of large groups, and that the example given, email providers, does in fact follow this pattern, both in individual email and in the business realm.
Pointing out that Microsoft and Google have multiple different ways to manage email does nothing to change the fact that people are managing their email with Microsoft and Google systems.
Re: Re: Re:14 Client =/= Hosting
Then it’s not clear what point you’re making at all.
Email is a healthy market with lots of competition. There is clumping around some solutions but, critically, all those solutions are completely interoperable with no friction, and nobody is ever trapped by a particular service or company.
It’s how more things should work.
Re: Re: Re:15 Client =/= Hosting
Why are you bringing lock-in into this? I didn’t say anything about lock-in. I said that centralization is inevitable, and demonstrated that it has happened in the realm of email when you tried to claim that email was a counterexample. Nothing more. Once again, please stop putting words in my mouth.
Re: Re: Re:16 Client =/= Hosting
I guess I was putting words in your mouth because I was looking for an actual point to respond to.
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That’s simply not true at all, dood! The structure of the modern Web makes email lock-in just about the biggest lock-in there is! Have you ever tried to leave your primary email provider, the one whose address essentially serves as your identity for every website you’re a member of? You basically can’t, because it serves as your identity for every website you’re a member of, dood!
Re: Re: Re:16 Client =/= Hosting
I’ve done it four times. It sounds like you’re confusing "mild inconvenience" for "impossibility".
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lol you must be pretty technically inept
Re: Re: Re:14 Client =/= Hosting
Remember: nobody ever claimed that in a world of open-protocol-based social media, there would never be some dominant social media tools with much bigger user-bases than others.
Of course there will be.
And if one of those dominant companies starts to suck and piss people off, they will lose dominance, because it will not be at all difficult for a competitor to rise up in their place and for users to switch over. And people choosing to use a competitor will just be choosing a different way to interact with the protocol, not a different walled garden entirely. And if one of those dominant companies kicks some people off their service, it won’t lock them out of the ecosystem altogether – they’ll be able to use one of many other tools based on the protocol, to access the same network.
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"And if one of those dominant companies starts to suck and piss people off, they will lose dominance, because it will not be at all difficult for a competitor to rise up in their place and for users to switch over."
As anyone who grew up getting used to Yahoo search can testify to. Google is the biggest right now only because large parts of it is still in the hands of techies who like making things work, rather than marketers whose first order of business is to compromise on functionality and ethics in the name of market shares.
Lately google has been slipping so there IS a market niche for a new contender – but the competency bar is VERY high.
Re: Re: Re:16 Client =/= Hosting
Google’s also got a level of lock-in that Yahoo never did. Of course you don’t have to use Google Search if you’re using Chrome or Android, but most people don’t change the defaults.
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This is categorically false. Many businesses use Google’s enterprise G Suite for email, not to mention I personally know of several businesses that use Lotus notes for email, and other businesses use other email providers. To say that all business email runs off Microsoft, is completely false, and mildly disingenuous.
Note, Outlook does NOT equal an email system. Outlook is a client that can connect to any email host/provider. It is not limited to Microsoft’s email services. Microsoft does offer a free email hosting solution (somewhat confusingly called Outlook.com) but that is completely separate from the Outlook email client.
I will admit Microsoft’s email systems (Outlook.com, on-premise Exchange, or cloud offering Exchange Online through Office 365) are the most popular, especially for businesses, but they are FAR from the only systems being used by businesses.
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All right. That sounds nice, but… when has it ever happened in reality? Human nature simply doesn’t work that way. Social systems have always tended towards centralization over time, because as a whole we find that the benefits of centralization outweigh the benefits of decentralization.
I disagree. History shows a pendulum that swings back and forth between centralization and decentralization, especially in technology. We went from giant mainframes to more decentralized systems in the past, and then back to more centralized services, and we can go back to more decentralized systems in the future.
Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to devote towards "curating their own experience," which means they’d be driven to adapt third parties’ curations, and those third parties would inevitably consolidate, and within 10 years (at the very most; likely far less) we’d be essentially back where we started, with two or three centralized massive curation systems that everyone’s using, all having the same problems of moderation at scale.
I disagree. I do agree most would use 3rd party curation, but the good thing is that even if some of them did consolidate, the fact that they are based on open standards means it would be quite easy to spin up a new option and competition if one starts acting badly.
Take email as an example. It’s built on open standards, and certainly you could argue that Google, in particular, has become a default with so many people using Gmail. But we never hear any complaints about Google being too heavy handed with Gmail — and that’s because it’s pretty easy for anyone to swap out to a different email system if they don’t like how Gmail works.
It becomes a check on too much power, and it’s a check that works really well.
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To add, even when I use a Gmail address, I don’t need to use the Gmail client, I can still shove that in apple mail, outlook, thunderbird, ect, and never deal with the ads in the gmail client.
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To add, even when I use a Gmail address, I don’t need to use the Gmail client, I can still shove that in apple mail, outlook, thunderbird, ect, and never deal with the ads in the gmail client.
Or — alternatively — even if you use a non Gmail address, you can still use the Gmail client (which no longer has ads anyway). And it’s all because of open protocols. People can piece together the solution(s) they want.
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I’m actually very familiar with the "pendulum" in question, and you’re unfortunately framing it quite out of context here. I’m talking about social structures, and you’re responding with an example based on technological limitations. The underlying technical issues you’re addressing weren’t about centralized vs. decentralized social structures, but about centralized vs. individual technological work.
We started out with big mainframes because computers were big and expensive–a super-scarce resource–and the most efficient way to make use of them was to build way more computer than one person needed and share it between many people. Once Moore’s Law got us to the point where individuals could have their own desktop computers with the processing power to take care of the work they needed, starting in the late 70s, things shifted to that paradigm because it simply works a lot better for various technical and user-experience reasons. But most computer work, even in the mainframe era, was not "social" in the sense we think of it today; it was a bunch of individuals sharing a powerful server.
Then, a couple decades later in the late 90s, the Web browser came along and made the Internet accessible to the average Joe. The Web was built on top of the Internet, which was originally designed as a decentralized system for a very, very specific purpose–to provide widespread geographic redundancy in order to make the total destruction of important information difficult even in the event of a nuclear attack, because Cold War–and started out with a decentralized architecture by default simply because it inherited that from the Internet. But the technical systems were a rigid client/server setup reminiscent of the old-time mainframes, because that was easy to implement.
Over time, both of these factors have flipped around. Without the specific constraints that applied to the design of the original Internet providing an overriding direction, human nature has run its course and we’ve seen the Web as a social system consolidate and centralize. On the technological front, however, we’ve re-learned the lessons of the past, that the rigid mainframe/client setup sucks for a number of reasons, and developed all sorts of technologies to push as much of the individual work of the Web as possible down to the individual client devices. Technologies such as AJAX, websockets, SPA frameworks and most notably smartphone apps that run mostly locally but use Internet connections to augment their functionality are indicative of this trend.
The social and technological sides of the Internet are distinct things that work in different ways (hence the common admonition in developer circles not to try to solve a social problem with a technical solution) and conflating the two simply causes confusion.
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"History shows a pendulum that swings back and forth between centralization and decentralization, especially in technology."
For good and valid reason. You’ve highlighted the technology aspect where open standards allows local control without loss of function. That technology also drives and is driven by the social aspects.
Centralization ALWAYS brings mission creep. The internet is a good example; The proper protocols to run packet traffic from network backbones to local routers are robust and simple. It would be easy to only hold one DNS index for the whole of it, for instance, and the optimal routing would never involve the sprawling interlinked networks we have today.
Yet after tinpot dictators, inept politicians, ten thousand eager copyright trolls, and the odd gang of DDoSing vandals have had their say we end up increasing distribution of the load any which way we can, from CDN’s down to locally run onion routing networks.
Centralization represents a single point of failure – of technology failing naturally or as a result of malicious action. With luck this is noted and steps taken towards decentralization before that point of failure is exploited.
After time passes the reason as to why decentralization was employed is forgotten and the creep towards centralization is on again, usually at the behest of control freaks obsessed with "ordnung muss sein".
We’re seeing that right now with Article 13 heavily pushed harder by politicians intent on control rather than the original shady crooks in the copyright cult.
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Except those systems would not necessarily benefit from network effects, which makes them easy to switch out. The goal of this plan is not to make sure there aren’t any dominant players, it’s to enable competition. If a few big players dominate because they’re awesome, then that’s fine. The market is being served. This is different from one or a very few big players dominating because it’s difficult to switch away from them or start a competitor.
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Content moderation at scale is impossible, and therefore…
…don’t expect perfect content moderation at scale.
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This brings the image of two lizards chasing each other’s tails forever in a circle to mind!
Or Facebook wanted to take the ads down and maybe found some silly rule that they violated to make that kind of thing happen.
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Or Facebook wanted to take the ads down and maybe found some silly rule that they violated to make that kind of thing happen.
That is, of course, a possibility, but a very unlikely one. Even as dumb and short sighted as Facebook can be at times, you can bet that even they would recognize how this would look and how it would totally backfire. That’s not what happened.
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That is, of course, a possibility, but a very unlikely one. Even as dumb and short sighted as Facebook can be at times, you can bet that even they would recognize how this would look and how it would totally backfire. That’s not what happened.
.
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The ads were taken down after it was discovered they violated the ToS.
Facebook uses fingerprinting to block naked children (porn or not) in images from being posted.
It would be absolutely stupid to think they wouldn’t fingerprint their own logo.
I’m open to the idea the blocking was not intentional, but so far, I’ve seen no reasonable excuse.
Personally, I believe this is just another moment Facebook got caught doing something it does on a daily basis.
The timing just wasn’t in their favor.
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Obviously. This supports the idea that that is the reason they were taken down.
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Or maybe Warren’s team wanted to make the ad go viral without spending a lot of ad money and purposefully broke Facebook’s ad rules in order to get it taken down so they could claim Facebook was censoring the message …
Or someone didn’t RTFM about ad posting.
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I will bet whatever I have in my wallet the ad posted was purely politically motivated and dared facebük to remove it.
Don’t you ever get tired of defending the worst people?
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To bastardise a good saying. If you don’t defend the worst people. There will be no one left to defend you when the time comes.
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From the movie A Man for All Seasons:
WILLIAM ROPER: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
SIR THOMAS MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
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Don’t you ever get tired of defending the worst people?
I’m not defending the worst people. I’m defending truth and accuracy. I have regularly criticized Facebook and think they have notoriously bad practices, which I’ve criticized.
But if you’re so focused on hating Facebook that you have to slam them based on inaccurate claims, well, that says a lot more about you than it does me.
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You should have asked “don’t you get tired of defending the worst people when they are being wrongly accused?”.
And it must be tiresome to argue FOR truth and accuracy when everybody else is focused on the ad hominen instead of the truth.
Umm.
Maybe I’m not understanding it right, but if I owned a website, and someone made an ad to put on my website that tries to start a process in taking down my website, or making it less popular or does some kind of damage to my website…why would I allow it on my website? It’s my website…I’m in charge of the website. I decide what goes on it. Why would I want something that could in the long run completely change it or one day make it weaker or make less money? I’m pretty sure the terms of service says they can decide what ads go on it anyway.
That’s like common sense isn’t it?
Re: Umm.
Yes, but none of that helps you when you are defending yourself against accusations that you are too powerful and capable of exerting too much influence over politics and society.
Re: Re: Umm.
Also interesting is that the policy gives Facebook’s brands special status; if it forbids misusing other brands, that’s not in the screenshot. (I just get a login screen when I try to follow the link.)
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That’s not "special status".
The brand they’re talking about in "Brand Usage" is their own brand. They’re granting you limited rights to use their registered trademarks, in ways that you might not be allowed to in any other ad services.
The logos and trademarks of other brands — even the ways accepted for the Facebook trademark — would generally be forbidden as a matter of copyright and trademark laws, even if not explicitly forbidden by Facebook policy.
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It says you "may make limited reference…for the purpose of clarifying the destination of the ad", which sounds a lot like nominative use. And it says you can’t write "FB", which is not something they’d normally have any right to prevent.
What rights are they actually granting that advertisers don’t already have? It’s entirely special status.
Re: Re: Umm.
I think it’s because Facebook is now almost viewed like a public utility, rather than an independent company.
Re: Re: Re: Umm.
Really, who in their right mind thinks that access to facebook is equivalent to having natural gas so that one can heat their house during the winter????
Re: Re: Re:2 Umm.
I don’t know if they’re in their right minds. But idiots do claim just that.
Re: Umm.
To paraphrase a famous quote from Jurassic Park, don’t spend so much time thinking about whether you can that you forget to consider whether you should.
If you’re going to appeal to common sense, consider this: When the argument that someone makes is that they have too much power to censor and a history of abusing it, is it not common sense that using your power to silence this ad is (or simply really really looks like, even if this isn’t factually the case) completely proving your opponent’s point?
Re: Re: Umm.
Friend I say this honestly and of good faith and I can’t believe I am defending Facebook… let me sound like I am in the same situation for a minute…
The person putting up ads against me is calling for a break up of my buisness during an election year in my own business and after said thing is done it would become little more then a small rally cry of what was a achieved during time in office for claps until the next elections.
I’m not betting exisance on politics.
Re: Re: Re: Umm.
Again, when taking down the ad can be used as evidence to further the agenda the ad was attempting to drive, it’s not a particularly good idea.
Sometimes you’re in a situation where there are no good options. Hypothetically, this could happen to you just because, and then life sucks for you. In reality–particularly in the business world–it usually happens as a result of you having done something to earn it.
Re: Re: Re: Umm.
Here’s the thing though, they’re doing so by barely throwing any money at all at those ads, and almost no-one is actually seeing the ads calling for your destruction. As it stands those ads are a minor annoyance; sure they’re calling for your company to be broken up, but basically no-one even knows the ads exist, so they aren’t likely to be very dangerous to you.
After you kill the ads though suddenly lots of people are aware of them, and your own actions have just provided a perfect example to be used against you. A minor annoyance suddenly became a much bigger problem, all because of what you did.
If the decision to be made, ‘leave it up’ or ‘kill it’ is centered around ‘which option is better for the company?’ then the former is much less damaging to the company, and a much smarter move.
Re: Re: Re:2 Umm.
I think this back and forth is the whole point.
They leave up the ad even though it violates the rules with the Facebook logo. "Well you let this ad run and it violates the rules." Looks bad.
They take down the ad because it violates the rules, people say "See!? See?! Too much power! Censorship!!" Looks bad.
Mike’s right. This is impossible. Nobody wins like this.
Re: Re: Re:2 Umm.
I still don’t get how this is a perfect example of anything deserving of being "broken up". Businesses reserve the right to refuse service, it’s in every EULA for every online service, too. Why should Facebook or any other company host political calls to damage the company under any circumstances?
Exercising First Amendment rights (and they are, particularly in this case since the "customer" is a government employee) is perfectly acceptable. Since when I exercising one’s rights grounds for punishment?
Re: Re: Re:3 Umm.
Logically, it isn’t, however as a cheap, nonsensical emotional ploy it could be very effective, especially with people already inclined to be against the company/companies in question.
Politician calls for companies to be broken up, claims they have too much power and control, and are using it abusively.
Politician puts out ad critical of companies.
Company being criticized pulls ad because it violates their ToS.
Politician points to ad being pulled and claims that that’s evidence that companies are silencing dissent and need to be controlled more, so that they can’t do that any more.
The fact that the ad was pulled not because it was critical of the company but because it violated their ToS for ads is conveniently never mentioned.
Re: Re: Re:4 Umm
I am no fan of Facebook but the whole saga has gone Kafkatrap.
Re: Umm.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s quite possible that you pulling down the ad will do more to further the goal taking down your website than the ad on its own ever could. Especially if your website is supposedly dedicated to and used for communication.
Re: Umm.
I was looking at it from the "business" standpoint. Coca-cola isn’t going to let an ad run that says "Coca-cola is bad" I’m hearing they’re proving the point that they have "too" much power. It’s like yeah they do have the power to remove you from their home. It’s their home. If you want to live there you don’t bite the owner of the house.
Re: Re: Umm.
I was looking at it from the "business" standpoint.
When you are a giant company, proposed federal regulation and your relationship with regulators and politicians (and the voters who elect them) is part of your "business" calculus. Just ask Amazon about its NYC facility.
Seems to me that
a better theory is that Elizabeth Warren’s people were fully aware of Facebook’s policy and decided to take advantage of the automated system. What better method of "getting your message across" than to have your ad taken down via an automated mechanism so you could scream about how horrible everything is?
Re: 'Oh darn, how'd that filter-triggering thing get in there...?'
Facebook’s ad archive shows that the four ads had less than $100 in backing each, with three garnering fewer than 1,000 impressions and one garnering between 1,000 and 5,000 impressions.
With numbers like that, yeah, I strongly suspect you hit it right on the head. Why bother spending a lot of money to promote the ad when you can include something that will allow someone else to ‘promote’ it for you in a way that (falsely) seems to support the ad?
Re: Re: 'Oh darn, how'd that filter-triggering thing get in there...
It’s not like people get the easiest narrative even if it’s false and run with it these days eh?
Why are you so eager to continue trying to convince everyone to give the benefit of the doubt to a corporation with a long history of lying and engaging in shady/abusive practices?
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Because assuming malice rather than stupid filtering on this instance is also assuming monumental stupidity on FB’s behalf?
It’s not giving them the benefit of the doubt(much) to assume that they wouldn’t deliberately give her ammo to be used against them.
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Because misunderstanding a problem rarely helps in fixing it.
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Why are you so eager to prove your lack of reading comprehension skills?
Given her history of less than truthful statements, I wonder why she thought posting an add violating Facebook policy was a good idea. Especially with the small spend, I can’t help but wonder if Warren did this deliberately, knowing it would be taken down.
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Given the paltry amounts spent on the ads I’m almost certain that that was exactly what happened here, which is certainly not helping my perception of her and her campaign.
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Yeah if I wanted a stupid demagogue who knows little about tech I would have voted for Trump!
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YoU Said a MouthFUL!!
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"Given her history of less than truthful statements"
What might some of them be and what is/are the source(s)?
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Her various stages of backtracking about her claim to be Native American are the most well-known.
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Ah, so, no examples then.
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I’m sorry, I thought the constant barrage of "Pocohontas" nonsense aimed at her had pervaded everyone else’s news feed, too.
She claimed her race as Native American in college, and in early job applications — even her application for passing the bar. She defended/denied saying "Well, I am just part Native American, but I didn’t know I was mistaken by Harvard to be a minority." Several Native American tribes protested, saying she holds no citizenship in any tribe and is not legally a Native American. This she admitted was true, but she decided to take a DNA test anyway… proving she had some native American ancestry but not of the region or amount she had claimed.
And of course the Republicans latched on like they did for Obama and made a big hoopla, but unlike Obama the evidence is not in her favor.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/07/elizabeth-warren-dna-results-percentage-cherokee-nation-native-american-column/2799968002/
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The whole saga is indeed deeply embarrassing for her, and her handling of it has been consistently terrible. But it’s also a very specific situation surrounding a very specific cultural issue. Don’t get me wrong, it reflects poorly on her – but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say it establishes a pattern that means we should suspect dishonesty and subterfuge of her at every turn. Feels like you’d have to already want to believe that, to let that be your foundational evidence.
And I even think the idea that her team hoped the ad would get taken down for the signal boost is entirely plausible (far more plausible than Facebook intentionally targeting it to suppress its message, given how stupid that would be) – but honestly I’d consider that plausible for any political campaign, whether it was run by a paragon of honesty or a pathological liar.
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It’s not the part about the specific cultural issue, it’s that she lied about it for political gain, then when found out, lied that she’d lied about it.
"Oh, I didn’t ever say I was. I didn’t know they hired me because they thought I was a minority; I don’t know why they thought I was."
Being dishonest for the sake of attracting attention to oneself for the advancement of one’s career. That seems like it applies to this situation pretty well, regardless of the actual topic that was being discussed.
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Hamilton’s just angry the fake Indian won over the real Indian, but when the "real Indian" was the one whooping and cheering and harassing his opponent’s supporters what else did he expect?
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Anyone who makes such a big deal out of being 1/8th anything for politicizing ain’t getting my vote.
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AND.. I never met a politician I didn’t Not like!
Said by a person seeking a position of power so that she can influence policy.
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…influencing policy is generally part of a senator’s job description, yes.
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Yes, but why should they have a monopoly on trying to do so.
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I don’t respond to strawmen.
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No, dood, you just create them.
Here we’re talking about recent bans issued by Facebook.
I’m still calling for the anti-trust sledgehammer for the companies repeated TOS three-card-monte to strip privacy from users without clarity, then proceeding to routinely mishandle data.
Blocking ability of users of their platform to access political messaging from a Presidential Candidate is just one more in a very long list of over-steps.
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"Blocking ability of users of their platform to access political messaging from a Presidential Candidate"
I’m a bit more concerned about their lack of integrity with respect to an idividual’s data that they seem to vacuum up, package and sell all the while trying to convince everyone that the respect your privacy – lol.
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Who is talking about that where?
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How are those anti-trust issues?
AUTOMATED content moderation at scale is impossible.
HUMAN moderation of this content is not. It’s just too expensive for today’s tech darlings to exist.
"Safety is too expensive" is not a justification for an automaker to eliminate seat belts from cars.
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An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It isn’t just contradiction.
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I wish Jhon Sanford Smith would pay thousands of humans to filter the Net for his stuff. Partially because I’d prefer it gone, if it even exists. Partially because the idea of the fucker burning his own reserves is a hilarious prospect.
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Nice idea, but futile. There’s nothing to filter, therefore it wouldn’t take a cent to do so.
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A bot is an obnoxious inhuman automaton that does nothing but spam the same scripted lines over and over again, dood!
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Seatbelts are the automated way, dumbass.
The human way would be that the car manufacturer hires someone to sit in the car with you and throw their hand in front of you if you’re about to crash.
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OK, how could humans have moderated (or declined to moderate) this issue in a way that would be consistent with Facebook policy, not detrimental to the public good, and not detrimental to Facebook’s reputation? Feel free to imagine that Facebook has millions of full-time highly trained moderators.
It’s the century of the cheap gotcha.
I think the real scandal is that this seems to set the precedent politicians deserve special treatment: these ads very clearly violate Facebook’s standards, were taken down, and yet now are back up.
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Political advertising is generally given more leeway than product advertisement; this is not a new development.
OMG FACEBOOK IS THE DEVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!
We’re holding children in cages.
We’re hiring pedophiles, serial killers, & rapists to watch over them.
We’ve got agents placing bugs in citizens homes b/c they are brown.
We’ve got secret laws being used to hide wrongdoing.
We’ve got courts & oversight who see nothing wrong with hosting & encouraging the creation of more child porn.
But lets keep focusing on facebook instead of admitting its just another dog whistle to distract people from the simple fact that no one is minding the store, we have no rights, & even video showing a cop shooting us in the back of the head while cuffed and on our knees doesn’t guarantee he will even be tried let alone convicted.
Society is a shitshow, and instead of trying to affix the blame on FB or Twitter or tech… how about we fix the fscking problems first then worry about where to assign the blame… not that we will every accept our culpability in handing them the right to do whatever they want to ‘bad people’ as long as they keep us safe, ignoring that when they run out of real and imaginary bad people they just start deciding we’re the bad people.
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If you have to describe something as a “dog whistle” it means you are dishonest and insincere.
Your use of Dogwhistle bullshit confirms you are a dishonest fanatical idiot.
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Like I’ve said elsewhere, a dog whistle is a special whistle that ordinary people can’t hear but dogs can. If you’re claiming to be able to hear it, what does that make you, dood?
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A dog whistle is nothing special, it’s just a whistle that produces a sound in the ultrasonic auditory spectrum. And if a person can hear it they have an above average auditory hearing range, which also means that using it as a metaphor for distracting people is seriously flawed since a very small fraction of the population can hear one.
Also, your syllogism doesn’t make sense.
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It’s not a perfect analogy, because analogies are never perfect. The idea of a "dog whistle" is that the surface meaning of the words is innocent, while the (small) target audience understands another meaning. The difficulty with analyzing such things is that there’s always the chance that there was no deeper meaning intended and it actually was innocent. Which is of course why people use such language – plausible deniability.
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Wow, lay off the tinfoil. Try some lithium instead!