Facebook Isn’t Just Allowing Lies, It’s Prioritizing Them

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/facebook-political-ads.html

by dredmorbius • 7 years ago

44 38 7 years ago

nytimes.com

buboard4• 7 years ago

This kind of bla bla is getting boring.

By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for its own breakup.

What does NYtimes think will change if FB and instagram separate?

rory096• 7 years ago

This is an op-ed by a law professor at Columbia, not the Times' editorial opinion.

csallen• 7 years ago

Who decides who's allowed to publish op-eds in the Times and what topics those op-eds will be about?

dominotw• 7 years ago

they chose that law professor at random to write an article of his choosing?

buboard4• 7 years ago

the corrolary "this is some random people's ad, not facebook's opinion" would then completely invalidate their argument

Infinitesimus• 7 years ago

"This is an Ad by a 3rd party, not Facebook's political stance".

Cheap shots aside, they are as responsible for this piece as much as Facebook is responsible for the ads on their platform of course

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

That quoted line... wow.

Is Facebook "in politics" more than carrying ads? I mean, I'm sure they lobby some (all the tech big boys do these days), but I don't think that's what's being referred to.

And if it's just carrying ads... there's this First Amendment thing. If the government were to want to break up Facebook because Facebook carried political ads, that would be really problematic.

cyrksoft• 7 years ago

What about traditional media lying all the time? By citing "sources" journalists can say whatever they want without any kind of accountability. This is just old media crying for losing to new media platforms.

narrator2• 7 years ago

True. The number of "anonymous sources say..." stories in the New York Times has gotten to the point of absurdity. Might as well be getting the news from 4chan.

alwayseasy3• 7 years ago

That's not how it works in real media organizations like the NYT. Here's a nice example of how AP explains "anonymous sources" to its journalists and readers. It's harder to trick the New York Times than Jacob Wohl and QAnon believers thought: https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-principles/telling-...

sword_smith• 7 years ago

Controlling the narrative is a lot of political power to have. And I guess alot of people don't want to see traditional media lose that power.

Jaygles• 7 years ago

At least the authors of paid ads and their intent can be reasonably sleuthed out by those interested in learning their origin and truthiness. The mass of ad agencies that put their content out through fake accounts with every attempt at hiding their content's true source(s) are more worrisome for me.

Maybe, if Facebook doesn't require an ad's content to be truthful, just placing a disclaimer such as "CONTENT IN THIS AD NOT GUARANTEED TO BE TRUE" will be enough to dissuade its consumers to believe everything they read.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

The NY Times isn't just allowing lies, it's prioritizing them. By allowing a certain law professor to publish opinion pieces that contain hyperbole, innuendo, and other misleading rhetoric, the NY Times is increasing the reach of this law professor. If it had not been for this opinion piece, millions of readers would otherwise have been unaware of this law professor, but are now exposed to his rhetoric thanks to the NY Times.

rexpop• 7 years ago

These questions of political bias in media always remind me of that old Hacker Koan:

In the days when Sussman was a novice...

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937

mostlysimilar• 7 years ago

Honest question: can you pay more money to NY Times to get your opinion piece more exposure? Can you target individual readers as an audience based on data NY Times has on them?

Spivak2• 7 years ago

I mean you can buy ads same as Facebook. It’s hard to SEO the NYT but if anyone could pay to get their posts a bigger organic audience on FB nobody would buy ads.

sodosopa• 7 years ago

That's what Gannett does in their numerous local newspapers.

alwayseasy3• 7 years ago

How much did this law professor pay to have the opinion piece published in the opinion section of the New York Times? Do you think a hyperbole about Mark Zuckerberg is comparable to a political ad full of lies?

CaptainZapp• 7 years ago

"By allowing a certain law professor to publish opinion pieces that contain hyperbole"

Well, you answered the question yourself: It's an opinion piece and clearly marked as such.

If said professor could spout his hyperbole in the actual news pages you'd have a point.

Facebook does not make any such distinction.

50656E6973• 7 years ago

Mass media in general has been profiting off rumors, gossip, and falsehoods for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The difference here is FB is doing it algorithmically on a much larger scale.

bhupy2• 7 years ago

By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for its own breakup.

Wouldn’t this be an unconstitutional basis for breaking up a company?

A popular jab at Zuck/FB is that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations, but only to the government.

Once a government decides that Facebook’s maximally permissive view on speech/ads is unacceptable, and goes on to pursue punitive action against it, isn’t that within the realm of the sort of government action that the First Amendment prohibits? How is that any different from the government applying punitive action against CNN or the NYTimes for publishing ads it deems dangerous/unacceptable?

buboard4• 7 years ago

By refusing to stay out of politics, NYTimes is building the case for its own breakup.

Now, THAT would be unconstitutional!

Gibbon12• 7 years ago

Wouldn’t this be an unconstitutional basis for breaking up a company?

Smells like to me that everyone knows Zuckerburg knowingly took money to run targeted campaign ads from foreigners. Which is both criminal and pierces the corporate veil. If the next government can prove it in court they can kill Facebook. And the stockholders can claw back all of Zuckerburgs wealth.

bhupy2• 7 years ago

That wasn't the argument made in this article.

It would be extremely difficult to prove that Zuck knowingly took money to run targeted campaign ads from foreigners, so that's probably not an option.

Spivak2• 7 years ago

Man the NYT editors must really hate FB to post an article like this every week. It’s not like I like Facebook or anything but this is just exhausting.

They’re a forum with user generated content and ads. They’re undertaking a huge moderation effort already — trying to have their army of underpaid moderators also police facts is just a problem that can’t solved because lies are cheap to spread and expensive to refute.

You could say something snarky like “well FB just shouldn’t exist then” which doesn’t take into account any replacement someone on HN would approve of would have worse moderation than FB.

The format of massive scale public square social media is the reason this happens. And unless you want to tell the world to get off Twitter and eat their vegetables there’s only so much you can do to keep fights from breaking down in a huge public meeting of people who are addicted to arguing and 0 distance away from every conversation.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Independent editorials are independent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21447815

tzs• 7 years ago

They’re a forum with user generated content and ads. They’re undertaking a huge moderation effort already — trying to have their army of underpaid moderators also police facts is just a problem that can’t solved because lies are cheap to spread and expensive to refute.

That argument is unconvincing, because Facebook already does fact check ads and disallows ads that lie. Here is their policy [1]:

Facebook prohibits ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organizations with particular expertise. Advertisers that repeatedly post information deemed to be false may have restrictions placed on their ability to advertise on Facebook. Find out more about Fact Checking on Facebook here.

The controversy is over Facebook's recent decision to exempt political ads from this fact checking.

Political ads are only a small part of Facebook's revenue, so it is very hard to believe that they have the resources to face check all the other ads but not to check the political ads.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/mis...

weci2i• 7 years ago

All things already mentioned in the comments here aside, it’s somewhat personally infuriating to see headlines like this. Facebook recently disabled my account because they can’t make sense of who I am (I wrote about it and posted here earlier). I don’t know what’s going on with their algorithms but they whacked my very legit account while allowing unfiltered political news. Seems the priorities are all out of order.

Facebook Isn’t Just Allowing Lies, It’s Prioritizing Them

Related Stories