While I agree and think I generally approve of tech companies banning political ads, these bans are still not an apolitical move.
They're going to disproportionately affect underdog and non-incumbent candidates, as well as anyone who needs the voters purged in places like Georgia.
I think it will affect the incumbent the most. Trump used the impeachment fiasco to do record fundraising, and now he’s heading into 2020 with a massive war chest.
With major platforms banning political ads, they’re increasingly making that war chest less valuable.
It's all a big coincidence, the timing of this, affecting a party that's not popular among tech titans, no breach of ethics here at all. Everyone remembers the groundswell opposition from tech, to the Obama campaign's use of social media and targeted advertising, right? No?
Wait, was the media and tech sprawling with fawning reviews, declaring the Obama campaign a genius use of tech?
The definition literally covers every side of the spectrum
From the president who would call it fiasco because he claims it's a partisan attack, to the house democrats who'd call it a fiasco because the senate has members saying they'll be working with the prosecution to throw it out as quickly as possible, and everyone in between.
This feels like a useless attempt to distract with semantics that isn't even correct if you really want to nitpick...
Remember when they praised the Obama campaign's efficient use of tech/social-media, including targeted advertising? Why do you think this new fangled opposition to political ad spend is timing itself right before the 2020 ramp up?
Hint: it's because tech Titans and their cronies can't tolerate an opposition campaign being just as good at tech/social-media targeting. Not because of some new found puritanical,
ethical hate of politics
This sounds more like a conspiracy theory. All of the "tech giants" are secretly collaborating to prevent Trump from advertising on their networks. That's much more likely than they've all just decided to juice isn't worth the squeeze and have more than enough money coming in without political ads.
It's not a conspiracy theory to say that the vast majority of employees at the tech giants are very anti-Trump. People were openly weeping in their offices after he was elected, execs gave people time off to cope.
The parent poster is correct. What was once praised as savvy is now being eliminated as an option all together as it's become useful to the other side of the political spectrum.
> People were openly weeping in their offices after he was elected, execs gave people time off to cope.
Same thing happened to certain classes of companies when Obama was elected, so what?
> The parent poster is correct
No they weren't. You don't just get to pass off an idea as fact.
> praised as savvy is now being eliminated
Because of bad press that's not worth the tiny revenues political ads bring in vs. everything else. Maybe they've simply made the better economic decision to avoid the revenue impact of these class of ads. Much more likely than "Tech Giants collude to deny Trump campaign access to social media advertising".
You keep calling it a conspiracy theory without providing any evidence that it is. It's a known fact that Obama was praised for targeted political advertising:
> You keep calling it a conspiracy theory without providing any evidence that it is
That's not how it works. You need to provide actual evidence to back up your conspiracy, other than "Obama did it once" and "I have a gut feeling".
How does Obama being praised for his campaign have ANYTHING to do with the motivations of staff and employees at these companies making these decisions today?
> ability to do exactly what Obama was praised for
If the staff of these companies was actually concerned about this issue, they wouldn't have allowed Obama to do this. It's clearly not an issue with the technique, but who is employing it.
> Have you been living under a rock? Cambridge Analytica?
Like I said, Obama did exactly that (from the article I posted):
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database."
No one in 2012 knew how out-of-control the combination of social media advertising combined with politics could be, and it's absolutely disingenuous to expect people to predict the future because you have the benefit of hindsight. Obama's campaigned happened to be the 1st, and it was newsworthy. Then the next cycle happened, Facebook had more than doubled in size and this time around the combination was abused - enter Cambridge Analytica and Russia.
Now the tech companies have spent days in front of the Senate & House in DC, and somehow we're surprised they've decided now of all times to call it quits? During one of the hottest political contests in recent history?
What's more likely - tech giants colluded to stiff Trump and the right, or they all decided not to be a player in something so political and rather lose out on inconsequential revenues?
To be fair they aren't entirely comparable even if they are both talked about as targetting. The Obama campaign was more about organizing as opposed to underhanded actions like abusing loose permissions.
The emphasis of reporting on the targetting as opposed to the worse moral dodginess confuses me even from a cynical "assume jealousy from old media" perspective. I only have vague guesses of incompetence for not emphasizing the even worse parts or not being their target audience.
Aren't they almost exactly the same though? From the article:
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
That's literally the thing people are upset that Cambridge Analytica did.
Can you please edit the name-calling out of your comments to HN, and generally not do flamewars here? From "This is a silly, childish conspiracy theory" and "Suuuuure" to "Have you been living under a rock", your comments stand out in this thread as particularly breaking the site guidelines.
If you have better information or know more of the truth than other commenters, it's important to present that in a form which readers can respect and learn from. Otherwise you end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for, leaving us all worse off.
This is how the system currently works. The best financed (so: most popular with business people) candidate gets heard the best and often times is pretty easily elected.
Is this even addressing the root cause of 2016 misinformation campaigning? I was assuming most misinformation was distributed as user-generated content, not ads.
How much was Spotify exploited as a media platform for campaign misinformation? Its cute that Spotify is doing this, but I think Facebook + Twitter were the big distribution channels (and probably Reddit is closest to the “astroturf core”).
Spotify is doing what they want to do for their platform. I’m not sure what you want Spotify to do about the user generated content on Facebook and Twitter.
The issue is that people are able to be targeted with surgical precision because of mass data collection. Banning political ads is just a half ass treatment of the effect.
And sociopath Zuck doesn’t even see the need to do that.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 74.7 ms ] threadThey're going to disproportionately affect underdog and non-incumbent candidates, as well as anyone who needs the voters purged in places like Georgia.
With major platforms banning political ads, they’re increasingly making that war chest less valuable.
Wait, was the media and tech sprawling with fawning reviews, declaring the Obama campaign a genius use of tech?
Phone banking, knocking on doors, and (as someone else said) traditional media are all easy ways to spend money.
Trump needed cost-effective social media before, but now he won't be as reliant on it.
Which is good. No more of Cambridge Analytica and following -
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-facebooks-embed-in-the-trum...
From the president who would call it fiasco because he claims it's a partisan attack, to the house democrats who'd call it a fiasco because the senate has members saying they'll be working with the prosecution to throw it out as quickly as possible, and everyone in between.
This feels like a useless attempt to distract with semantics that isn't even correct if you really want to nitpick...
Hint: it's because tech Titans and their cronies can't tolerate an opposition campaign being just as good at tech/social-media targeting. Not because of some new found puritanical, ethical hate of politics
The parent poster is correct. What was once praised as savvy is now being eliminated as an option all together as it's become useful to the other side of the political spectrum.
Same thing happened to certain classes of companies when Obama was elected, so what?
> The parent poster is correct
No they weren't. You don't just get to pass off an idea as fact.
> praised as savvy is now being eliminated
Because of bad press that's not worth the tiny revenues political ads bring in vs. everything else. Maybe they've simply made the better economic decision to avoid the revenue impact of these class of ads. Much more likely than "Tech Giants collude to deny Trump campaign access to social media advertising".
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
It's also a fact that these very left leaning platforms are now removing the ability to do exactly what Obama was praised for.
You've not disputed either of those, just called the people pointing them out childish conspiracy theorists.
That's not how it works. You need to provide actual evidence to back up your conspiracy, other than "Obama did it once" and "I have a gut feeling".
How does Obama being praised for his campaign have ANYTHING to do with the motivations of staff and employees at these companies making these decisions today?
> ability to do exactly what Obama was praised for
Cambridge Analytica?
> Have you been living under a rock? Cambridge Analytica?
Like I said, Obama did exactly that (from the article I posted):
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database."
Now the tech companies have spent days in front of the Senate & House in DC, and somehow we're surprised they've decided now of all times to call it quits? During one of the hottest political contests in recent history?
What's more likely - tech giants colluded to stiff Trump and the right, or they all decided not to be a player in something so political and rather lose out on inconsequential revenues?
The emphasis of reporting on the targetting as opposed to the worse moral dodginess confuses me even from a cynical "assume jealousy from old media" perspective. I only have vague guesses of incompetence for not emphasizing the even worse parts or not being their target audience.
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
That's literally the thing people are upset that Cambridge Analytica did.
If you have better information or know more of the truth than other commenters, it's important to present that in a form which readers can respect and learn from. Otherwise you end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for, leaving us all worse off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's a surcharge to avoid political ads, but hey Mr. Bloomberg, if you need to get attention... we will collect your money.
What would they do with this extra money? Fund open source foundations?
...wait... is $10Million too low? Is there that much money in politics?
How much was Spotify exploited as a media platform for campaign misinformation? Its cute that Spotify is doing this, but I think Facebook + Twitter were the big distribution channels (and probably Reddit is closest to the “astroturf core”).
Edit: grammar
And sociopath Zuck doesn’t even see the need to do that.