I wasn’t tone policing. I was pointing at you and laughing.
Im betting its alcohol talking. If he tried to talk to people in real life like he talks to people here, he would be getting beaten up all the time. If he has a wife and kids I feel for them.
What kind of recreational pharmaceuticals does it take to make a hysterical fruitcake like you?
I think this is the stupidest post I’ve ever seen from you; and that’s saying something!
The system includes gerrymandering and voter suppression. “Democracy and liberty — get over it.”
The system includes overriding, by 5-4 Scotus vote, laws regulating campaign finance. “Democracy and liberty — get over it.”
The system includes de-funding of public education. “Democracy and liberty — get over it.”
The system includes election interference by our enemies. “Democracy and liberty — get over it.”
…
I could go on, but what’s the point? Find a sixth-grader to explain the above examples; then come back.
All kidding aside: Give me some help here, Dopers. Has octopus ever posted anything intelligent in all his time here?
…I don’t agree with a lot of **octopus’s **politics, but I’ve never found him/her to be unreasonable in debate and able to be convinced with evidence to be able to change their position. And octopus, as well as asahi, supported me when I went out-to-bat for Huey. I’ll never forget that. That was a very, very rough time for me and both of them reached out privately and helped me through it and I’ll never ever forget that. I’ll always appreciate both of them no matter how annoying others may find them 
So the answer to your question is an unqualified “yes.”
None of which were the topic of your OP, which was about Facebook refusing to scrub and fact-check political ads. Facebook has no obligation to allocate any of it’s resources toward fact checking any statements, memes, ads or random bullshit posted by politicians, Russian Trolls, or emotionally unstable wackjobs like yourself. Further, the government shouldn’t be wasting it’s time trying to pressure a company into suppressing free speech in any capacity. Talk about the first steps of a dystopian society…
I don’t mind targeted advertising. I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me, than useless junk, diabetes medicine, kids’ cereal or whatever. If I have to be exposed to ads, it’s better if they are useful or at least related to my interests. But I can see how disturbed freaks with strange kinks and disturbing search histories might be bothered by the ads they’re exposed to. Otherwise, I can’t understand why people get so twisted about the type of data fed to and tracked by internet companies and social media.
To your second and third points, if Facebook is lying to advertisers and investors, then there are civil and criminal laws in place for dealing with such things. It doesn’t require Congressional hearings or blanket insults fired at thousands of strangers on message boards.
I don’t believe or trust ads at all, of any kind. They utterly don’t effect me other than to irritate the hell out of me.
I realize that many people do watch and actually enjoy ads, and may be gullible enough to believe what’s being said, but there are ads everywhere, not just FB. What are you going to do, squash all advertising?
Facebook ain’t the problem, it’s a much, much deeper thing.
…except we aren’t talking about targeted advertising. We are talking about micro-targeted dark propaganda. Once again, as Jack from Twitter said "Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
We don’t know what they are doing. Those Brexit ads that said stuff like “Britain’s new border is with Syria and Iraq”, most of us didn’t even know they existed until two years after they were deployed. The advert with a bullfighter that said “These are animals, not entertainment, stop animal abuse, VOTE LEAVE” were micro-targeted at “animal lovers”. You can’t combat that kind of messaging. Not when you don’t know that that messaging even existed. Not when you** can’t match the funding provided by billionaires and sophistication of organizations like Cambridge Analytica**. Both Brexit and the last US Election were won in the tightest of margins. And if you are rich enough you can buy the information and you can create the right algorithms to nudge those margins just enough to win the majority vote.
Twitter did absolutely the right thing when they banned political advertising on its platform. Its all happening too fast, and its happening at overwhelming scale, we need to take a pause so we can figure out exactly what is going on. Facebook should absolutely follow Twitters lead.
I just read that both Facebook and Youtube are working to remove any reference to the whistle blower. Twitter has said naming him is not a violation of the terms of their service.
All these tech companies need some rules to play by.
I’ll have to think about this more. Perhaps I am just so used to ignoring political ads on Facebook that I don’t really seem bothered or affected by them. There’s something seriously wrong with people who get their political news from Facebook, I think. But I don’t know if sheltering them from their own stupidity, naivety and impressionability is the answer. I think society is generally too quick to demand that the government step in to “fix” things, and I am perhaps overly cautious when those demands teeter on infringing on things like free speech.
I don’t disagree with this. Twitter surely did the right thing; perhaps the best thing. But having the government jump in and attempt to bully Zuckerburg (or any private person or corporation) into taking a particular course of action isn’t the best approach. Especially when, as you rightly point out, we haven’t figured out “exactly what is going on” so we can’t possibly know exactly how to combat it.
One thing I am certain of, is that attacking, insulting, and shaming people who 1) find Facebook useful; 2) are not influenced by stupid memes or other propaganda; 3) aren’t ashamed or paranoid about the “private” information collected by internet-based business and social media is definitely not the best course of action. Someone such as the OP who prides him(her?)self as someone who gets politically involved and tries so hard to convince others of his/her particular views should take that into consideration. You’re never going to convince anyone with that technique, and are probably doing more harm than good.
Hello, I guess we’re being Mr. Hyde today. In your Dr. Jekyll personality, you support centrist corporate tools like Biden, and your main complaint with Bloomberg is that you wish he’d have run in 2016.
Seriously, are there two people fighting over control of your Doper identity? It frequently seems that way.
Lemme give it a try, with 98% less rage than the OP:
The problem isn’t you. The problem is that there are tens of millions of Americans who uncritically absorb the stuff on Facebook. And it affects their voting.
I guess we could blame the Russian bots, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about them directly.
If a hostile power were paying McDonalds for access to their French fry supply and distribution network, and they were using that access to sneak opiods into the fries, I’d be pretty upset if McDonalds was just shrugging and saying it wasn’t any of its business to police what got into its food.
(An overwrought analogy, but best I could do at the moment.)
Agreed that FB is a want, not a need. I find it to actually be an unpleasant environment, and have probably spent less than half an hour on FB in the past year.
But while I can take or leave Facebook, there’s no way I can walk away from its pernicious effects on our democracy. Those affect me whether I ever go near a computer, tablet, or smart phone.
Is actual advertising the problem? Or is it all of the fake news, viral crap-posts–many of which are from fake accounts created specifically to spread disinformation? If it’s the latter, how does Twitter plan to combat that? If it’s the former, then why waste time with Zuckerburg at all? The federal government has more power to modify campaign laws than it does to dictate what type of advertisements Facebook is allowed to accept, and how much effort and money and resources they need to divert to vet the statements made in those ads. They could pass a law forbidding political advertising and campaigning on social media altogether.
I said earlier in another post, Twitter solution has the particular elegance of not requiring them to be the ones who pass judgement on the veracity of the advertising or having to choose who they can trust to do it. Just no political ads, period.
Actually they CAN’T do that last one, that’s why they decide to try and shame Zuck into it (thus themselves using the tools of social media culture). Otherwise, yes, those are problems that would remain even in the absence of the official overt ads.
Decaf???
HERESY!!!
No. Not once, not ever. Not ever in the history of ever.
This person makes a lot of sense.
Listen to him.
“The problem,” said the theater manager gravely, “is not the people who keep screaming ‘FIRE!!!’ It’s the gullible idiots who believe it, and trample each other to death trying to escape.”
That’s a great analogy.
They could pass any law they like. The president wouldn’t sign it and the courts wouldn’t uphold it. This is one of the top reasons to keep the Republicans in power.