Where do you draw the line? If I share something political, am I advertising? If I can't share it, which topics am I forbidden from discussing exactly?
What if I only saw this political article because someone else promoted it? What if was one-sided or even false? How does Facebook detect that?
There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook" or twitter, while allowing people to talk politics.
Advertising on Facebook is a specific, paid mechanism for delivering messages to an identified target audience segment, that is completely distinct from their social content sharing features. Heck, you might not remember it, but there was a time when there was no advertising on Facebook at all.
Regulating that specific mechanism is well within the purview of the FEC, and can be done without interfering with the ability of Facebook users to share content with their own network of connections.
Slowing down fake news is a good thing, and nothing is perfect, which was rather my point too. The grandparent poster states that "(facebook) should not be a platform for propaganda", an absolute statement implying that it is desirable to keep _all_ "propaganda" off facebook (it might be, assuming you can define propaganda) and that it is also reasonably possible to do so (a lot less likely).
I take the point about paid ads, but that does not cover all of "propaganda" any more.
I suggest that it is very possible that Facebook, with its access to something like 1 billion MAUs, needs to be regulated, and regulated possibly differently than companies before it. The FEC has some rules for political ads with respect to the Internet, but I am in favor of revisiting those to see what rules need to be established for the greater good of the public
>There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook"
It appears that Russians bought $100,000 worth of ads, so that is some place to start looking that is wholly different than a discussion on politics of users.
Indeed it does seem cheap. They don't have to click on them, though. They don't have to log in and take out their CC to be effective. Neither do political TV ads and other older media. It wasn't enough to win the popular vote, but could it have been enough to change some folks' minds in swing states where the EC gives them more weight? Maybe yeah. Maybe enough that the feds are looking at the Facebook ad buys.
Fake news does not look like ads, and if targeted to receptive individuals, it gets retweeted/fb-shared to a like-minded audience. The comparison with "nobody clicks on ads" is not apt.
What if I only saw this political article because someone else promoted it? What if was one-sided or even false? How does Facebook detect that?
There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook" or twitter, while allowing people to talk politics.