Via @donie. At best, this is disingenuous, at worst it's entirely misrepresenting what's happening.
Please explain how "the press" can counter lies in realtime, that may have thousands or tens of thousands of variables, targeted at distinct, secret audiences?
Please explain how "the press" can counter lies in realtime, that may have thousands or tens of thousands of variables, targeted at distinct, secret audiences?
@donie The problem, as ever, is Facebook itself, its structures and its incentives. As Facebook staffers said: there seems limited reasons to accept targeted, variable, political lying. There are many reasons not to accept those ads.
@donie The mistake being made, willfully or not, is to say that "broadcast" where we have a *shared experience of a lie* told by a political party, is *equivalent* to a targeted lie, of which there may be thousands of variables to many different people. They're not the same thing.
@donie The scale is also different. It's one to many versus thousands to possibly thousands of audience segments. How can "the press", gutted by cuts, now ostensibly police Facebook with "facts" to counter industrialised deception? Short answer: they can't, even with more tech or people
@donie I would argue that this part of the letter FB staffers sent to management is correct. Yes I'm *agreeing* with Facebook staffers who disagree with management. It's likely societies will need to ban this sort of targeting entirely. We can't rely on Facebook to regulate.
@donie This is being framed by Facebook as a freedom of expression issue. It's not.
Please explain how non technical newsrooms with few staff will counter industrialised paid deception on FB, and both rapidly factcheck *all* deception, *and* reach the same audiences with the truth?
Please explain how non technical newsrooms with few staff will counter industrialised paid deception on FB, and both rapidly factcheck *all* deception, *and* reach the same audiences with the truth?
@donie Please explain how this can be done when, not if, a campaign spends 100s of millions of dollars, on thousands of lies, tens of thousands of variable ads of those lies, reaching thousands of audiences? Because if the answer is: "use our Ads API", it's the wrong answer.
@donie a) Newsrooms don't have the capability to engineer vast Ads API analysis engines containing those thousands of variables.
b) Even if they could, the solution of "fact checking" is insufficient and inherently slow.
c) They also have YouTube, Insta, WA and more to deal with.
b) Even if they could, the solution of "fact checking" is insufficient and inherently slow.
c) They also have YouTube, Insta, WA and more to deal with.
@donie The only solution I see for now is ban targeted political ads. A halfway house would be to allow politicians and parties to place ads on Facebook. But no targeting, limit ad variability, make it "broadcast" only.
@donie Newsrooms are still getting up to speed with Excel folks.
Asking them to invest in infra, which includes API analysis and human intelligence in order to police (and indeed counter) mass deception on Facebook is a bit, well, rich.
Asking them to invest in infra, which includes API analysis and human intelligence in order to police (and indeed counter) mass deception on Facebook is a bit, well, rich.
@donie And if as @sherylsandberg said to @katiecouric recently that revenues from paid political ads are "very small, very small, - we're not doing this for the money" then Facebook won't miss the revenues, will they?
This a good move. Facebook should replicate, as outlined above.
Preach. See above.
I agree.
