[iagovar]

I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us, I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot more companies doing this in the US.

Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries, arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.

[jacques_chester]

If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an improvement on the status quo.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.

[iagovar]

If I, working there, found that FB was painful to work with, I'd go somewhere else, as simple as that. I won't spend two days wrestling with FB to see if my ad it's ok or not.

I may not care for political advertising, since my client is not looking to "make a profit" like a traditional customer. But I definitely do for an eCommerce brand for example.

Most agencies use FB because it's easy to work with and it's cheapish with a little expertise. If that dissapeares then nobody is goung to pour money on it.

[DrScientist]

Exactly.

Facebook et all grew on the fact that they could automate the process - but in reality they have only automated part of it - the easy part of taking the money and placing the ad - not checking the content.

If they can't check the content in an automated way ( very hard because people will be actively working against you ) and the remedy is to have an army of people checking content then their competitive edge over the traditional business model largely disappears.

The other way to fix this - which I'd imagine Facebook and Google might want to push - is to put the responsibility onto the generator of the content. Google and Facebook could easily help automate the the shifting of responsibility if everyone is identifiable.

Imagine the CASE act - but automated for everyone who breaches copyright on youtube... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disa...

That would be like a newspaper not taking responsibility for a story being wrong - simply passing the legal blame onto a source - while there is some justice here as the source has a responsibility also, it is ignoring the fact that the platforms play a role in placing and promoting the content.

[criddell]

> this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public

I'm not a fan of this argument. It reminds me of people saying that the big US banks are too big to fail during the sub prime mortgage crisis a decade ago. If the banks are too big to fail, then we better fix the regulation of those banks so they are less likely to fail or break the banks up.

If Facebook is too big to effectively moderate what it publishes, then reduce how much they publish (ie your Agency is going to be rate limited) or break up Facebook into pieces that can moderate their traffic.