Political Ads Opinions

political ads on fb is a complex issue

1. global experiments show that if we stop running political ads, incumbents gain an edge in any election, because while newcomers generally buy media coverage, incumbents are already household names. is that right? if so, then it should be mandated across all forms of media, not just facebook, to block political ads.

2. what's a political ad? we don't have a magical neural net that flags "is political", and as a partisan media platform in a field that barely acknowledges bias as a scientific problem, we probably shouldn't. our current definition of this covers ads that are paid for a political campaign. but in general, it's hard to draw the line - if you decide to promote a local non-profit that lobbies for universal healthcare, is that a political ad? what about promoting informational events about politicized concepts like immigration or climate change? should these be blocked or fact-checked, whatever that means?

3. users say they don't think it's easy to distinguish between whats trustworthy and what's not. the least dystopian response we can have is to offer a warning when we recognize that a political _statement-of-fact_ (not a political _opinion_) is incorrect. also, it's weird to move in this direction, cuz we don't want to be and probably shouldn't be the fact-checker or source-of-truth for this kind of stuff. also, it's a much harder task to identify whether or not a statement-of-fact is misleading (not incorrect), like the "despite 13%" statistic that white supremacists use all the time

4. we can't just "opt out" of running political ads - if we wiped our hands clean and stopped paying attention, a ton of awful stuff is likely to happen. also, if we start auto-blocking ads that are somewhat political, we start playing cat in an adversarial cat-and-mouse game against abusers of our classification system, and you can imagine the extremes that would drive the platform to. this isn't just an engineering problem, either, and not something we can just throw smart people at and fix, not something we can "hotfix" or "revert" when we make mistakes.

5. our opinions on this are inherently US-centric. political ads in social media platforms have historically been and continue to be a huge contributor to spreading democracy. for many people all over the world, they are one of the few ways to be exposed to the viewpoints diverging from those being spread by state propaganda machine.

6. read Mark's opinion on this: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/standing-for-voice-and-free-expression/10157267502546634. tl;dr, he thinks people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. obviously, there's many people at fb who disagree and we talk about this all the time.

(I'm just an employee, so take this with a grain of salt and don't conflate it with FB's official stance on the issue)