Thread by @markscott82

On Friday, a battle broke out between @Facebook & researchers at @nyuniversity about efforts to boost transparency about how voters are being targeted w/ political ads ahead of US election. politico.com/news/2020/10/2…

A thread on what this all means.

<<cracks knuckles>>

Let's start off w/ political ads. There's massive money being spent on these ads -- estimates of $230 MILLION alone in week before FB bans political ads in the US as of tomorrow. That is not a small amount of money, to be clear.

FB says that this NYU plug-in breaks its polices (most likely around privacy) and that it takes seriously any efforts by third-parties (cough, Cambridge Analytica, cough) to access its users' data.

One could argue that if FB has an issue, it's w/ users who grant the NYU researchers access to their data, but why quibble, amirite?

The bigger point is NYU has found (in the past) lots and lots of political ads getting through FB's net politico.com/news/2020/03/0…

Feels like there's a legit reason to be offering this granular transparency, and it's something that FB could possibly do (in a privacy-friendly way), but has decided not to. And no, let's not get started on FB's ad library and its limited functionality

Caveat: it's still a lot better than anything that @Google or @Twitter have on offer, so hat must go off to FB for actually taking this transparency push somewhat seriously. I'm looking at you, Google & Twitter.

But let's not forget. Political ads are just part of the issue here. It's an easy thing to focus on because you can look at the figures, see what people are spending and track (some of the messaging). It's a lot better than it was in 2016, that's for sure.

But researcher after researcher I talk to is concerned they are missing something about how tactics have evolved ahead of next week's election. It's something that I've wrote about before -- that we're fighting the last war, not dealing w/ current threats politico.eu/article/fake-n…

There's still a lot of dark money out there in this year's election cycle (more on that in the coming days), and the lack of demographic data provided by the social media giants means it's very very difficult to know what's going on, and who's seeing what

And that's just the paid-for messaging. State-backed actors, notably Russia, are still doing what they've always done. And it's fair to say that FB has (so far) done a pretty good job at catching these campaigns earlier & earlier politico.eu/article/russia…

But, again it comes down to the unknown unknowns. What new tactic, if any, are we missing? And is just the specter of Russian influence enough to muddy the waters & sow mistrust in an election that is already seeing its fair share of ugliness (waits for understatement to sink in)

For me, the biggest issue is what's happening within domestic groups, and how they are either being shaped or used by wider forces (the useful idiot argument). Those posts are legitimately protected on freedom of speech grounds. But there's so much BS out there (from both sides)

And it doesn't even need to be politically-motivated. This clickbait operation that I found this month politico.com/news/2020/10/1…) was just one dude in upstate New York trying to make a buck from pushing pro-Biden & pro-Trump content. And it took off big time on FB

My point is this: we have come a long way since 2016, but I would argue that the US is the outlier in terms of data. Most countries in the world still don't have a FB ad register available, locally. And even those that do, the granularity available is poor.

In UK, for instance, you can search only by countries within the union -- so that's England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland. Not exactly helpful when microtargeting can be done to the nearest zip code.

But researcher after researcher tells me that they are not really clear on what's going on, that they believe they are missing things and that much still needs to be done to offer the same level of transparency available in offline campaigning.

This is when I say FB tells me their ad library offers greater transparency than what's available for TV/radio ads. My response is: sure, but I can't buy individualized ads to specific tv/radio listeners, down to a few people, like I can on FB. But hey, you do you.

So that's where we are with a week to go. Yes, improvements on before. Yes, more awareness of the issues at hand. But still not really good enough -- and all non-US elections are in a significantly worse position in terms of transparency compared to Nov. 3 vote

Sure, other elections don't have the same level of political ad spend as happens in the US. But there's still a high level of misinformation, state-backed interference & other partisan politicking that also requires a greater degree of oversight

Something that both the platforms and (raises eyebrows) local lawmakers have steadfastly refused to offer -- all while this stuff continues at pace. Myanmar election, for instance, is on Nov. 8 (caveat: FB, for past wrongs, is spending a lot of time looking at Myanmar)

Rant over. Thoughts appreciated.

PS: Interesting stats on how campaigns are using political ads on FB. Most figures are (kinda) the same. But Trump campaign outspending Biden 30x in get-out-the-vote ads. Reminder: FB's ad ban comes into force tomorrow.