A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That's not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc.

Some people push it so far that the solution of unfriending them is easy. But not everybody is so egregious that I want the nuclear option. (For example, relatives who are vocal about politics.)

Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

Maybe this would even go beyond making my own feed better. If enough people feel the same, maybe it would cut down on the audience size and reduce people's temptation to get on a soapbox.

> Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.

You are over-thinking this. Just filtering obvious political stuff would be a massive help:

- Mentions of politicians

- Key words: Liberal, Conservative, Right-wing, etc etc

- Material re-shared from political parties/ candidates/ movements.

Just that would be a giant help. Allowing users to set their own filters would be a massive help.

None of this makes Facebook money though so it won't happen.

These organizations will strip normal news of any political connotations which is frightening because the news, although mostly a pile of noise today, is supposed to have signals to keep democracies in line by design.

Another is organisations will keep the same content (as this is what drives clicks and profitability), however change the language used to describe it.

I would say this outcome is worse, as it leads to things like newspeak, muddying of definitions, and an increase in accusations of dogwhistling (accurate or otherwise). We may already be on this path, but it would be accelerated.

If you disagree with that definition of political connotation, how do you define political connotations?

If politicians are doing things that stress you out or make you angry, would you really be better off staying uninformed? I'm not saying that Facebook is a good way to accomplish that, just that it's worth considering before you ask for technology to seal yourself off from political news altogether.

TBC, these are my personal opinions and how you view and use social media could be different. It's clearly not for me anymore.

- Me riding bikes with my friends - Not politics.

- My friend turning 50 - Not politics.

- Organizing a game night - Not politics.

- My buddy getting a new car - Not politics.

- A friend getting engaged - Not politics.

etc etc etc...

There are million things in the world which are not politics. The whole reason I used to go to Facebook was to hang out virtually with my friends and keep up with what they are doing. Unless they are actually going to a political rally, that's not politics. And if they are, I care about that too because they are doing it.

The big problem with Facebook is at some point everyone collectively decided it is their own personal soapbox so now it's filled with everyone standing on their little podiums shouting their opinions about everything from facemasks to whether it's ok to shoot people in the back.

> I have come to peace that I'll text my friends directly and that's it. Once a month or so I log on to facebook and comment on personal updates.

This is exactly what I do, because when you text people directly they are thinking of you as you, not as their own personal soapbox.

What about new terms like kraken ?

In case of online content moderation think in terms of signal/noise and context.

The same thing is benign or malicious based on the context It finds itself in.

Your filter list assumes a static context - your particular imagining of context in this case.

Obviously What’s noise for you is signal/hurtful to someone else.

Run this over N sub groups of subscribers and you have an impossible problem.

Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name.

For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting things right is often not simple.

> For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong.

As with most flippant axioms and generalities this catch-phrase is quite often just wrong. Often there are simple solutions that are just fine.

I used Facebook Purity for quite a while and set up simple keyword based filters and while they weren't perfect, it was a lot better than the default feed.

This is pretty much a solved problem, and it actually is pretty simple: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

Is LGBT political? Is support for immigration political. Is climate change political? Is COVID-19 political?

Trying to be impartial here is a fool's game.

There are important issues, absolutely. But my personal relationships with other humans are not based on their hot takes on those issues.

I would just prefer an option where I only saw content my friends actually took the time to post themselves. I don't want politics, memes, or other trendy bullshit, just their words, pictures, or even links they personally took the time to clip and paste. If I want news or entertainment, I can find that myself, but Facebook is currently the single best place for me to connect to a bunch of my friends and I'd love to see that without all the other bullshit.

Of course that's not what makes FB money so it'll never happen, which is why I just stopped using it entirely. (Well that plus the fact that it's run by a bunch of sociopaths)

I was working on a script to hide shared posts, but it broke after the last update. Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?

This sounds way to time consuming to me for way too little reward.

For people who just share too much, besides the nuclear option or unfriending or unfollowing, I like the 30 day mute.

I find this focus (attack?) on political advertising on social media platforms by traditional media companies to be self-serving and hypocritical. The craziest political ads have been run on local TV and newspapers for decades [1] and everyone just accepted it as part of a normal political discourse ... but now there is a concentrated effort to prevent or "fact check" political ads on Facebook and Twitter. Why? I'm sure it has nothing to do with billions spent on political ads (revenue that will go to traditional media outlets if it can't be spent on social media), nor anything to do with the pro-Democratic party bias in almost all traditional media.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA

The piece indicates that there will be an option off political ads entirely, not to block political ads by partisan affiliation. (The latter is both more complex to even superficially inplement and would be rather ineffective because SuperPAC ads are formally unaffiliated with either parties or candidates.)

Also FYI: The adjective for “Associated with the Democratic Party” is “Democratic”, just like the adjective in the party name. “Democrat” is the noun form.

EDIT: I'm going to quote and respond to a dead reply, because it makes a common point which deserves a response rather than downvoting to oblivion:

> Yes, but Republicans consistently use the term 'Democrat' instead of 'Democratic' because they don't want to imply that Democrats have a connection to the concept of Democracy.

> It's a shibboleth; folks who instinctively say "Democrat" are reliably far-right.

While this is correct as to the origin and the tactical employment of the usage, it is not a reliable indicator because lots of people who aren't far-right or Republican partisans are exposed to media in which far-right (or at least solidly Republican partisan) voices which embody this tactic are common and don't realize that is what it is, and adopt the pattern from that source.

The ones who persist after correction are doing it intentionally and tactically, though.

You cannot target people with such precision in traditional advertising.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say social media advertising and data collection is the biggest risk to democracy that we have ever faced.

The "echo chambers" explanation, in particular, seems wrong. Echo chambers always existed.

Before near real-time national news media coverage and the ubiquity of portable recording devices and online media to distribute the recordings, that was normally the case, but the segmentation was geographic and by addressing selected audiences in closed events. Many political gaffes and scandals of the last couple of decades have been candidates getting caught with unexpected exposure of addresses to either specific geographical markets or closed-group events that were less palatable to general audiences. It won't be too long before political groups maintain social media personas with a variety of constructed backgrounds to capture and expose to wider audiences to which the message would be repugnant those ads that the other side targets narrowly.

Echo chambers always did, but I think the bubble-forming dynamic we have now is a bit different. It's not that I have my own views echoed back to me by the communities I'm in all the time, it's that so much of my exposure to opposing views is often coming from some of the dumbest and most unhinged people on Earth. It's the filtering for nutcases more than echoing back confirming views that seems to be the issue.

It's really easy to believe that certain perspectives are only held by insane people if the only people you see speaking for them happen to be insane. And even if they're not crazy, normal people aren't really going to be interested in communicating nuance or understanding if they're hastily firing off a missive during a toilet break.

There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the big ones is that our intellectual institutions have given themselves over to internet troll logic, including many prestigious Op-Ed pages. In the past you might have encountered plenty of nuts, but you could also see similar enough versions of their ideas being advanced by people who could construct an argument that didn't rest entirely on motivated reasoning, and include enough nuance so as to not be monstrous. But at this point, many professional opinion havers aren't any better or more cogent than a regular Twitter troll. It's mostly just Frankfurtian bullshit all the way down.

Drezner actually has some really good ideas about the replacement of "public intellectuals" with "thought leaders" that touches on this dynamic. https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-h...

>The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”

Yes, absolutely. The prevalence of stupid "both sides" reasoning calls into being the contrarians and gives them a platform - in order to have someone say the world is round, you have to find a flat earth pundit as well and put them opposite each other so the public can enjoy the fight.

The kind of people who find themselves cited in mass shooter manifestoes. At least the Unabomber wrote his own deranged manifesto; these days people assemble them piecemeal from everyday racism and conspiracism.

To be fair he was given an elite education and was, by many accounts, an actual genius and math prodigy. Most people don't clear that bar.

Climate change denial correspondent for Times, Telegraph, Spectator: James Delingpole

Wrong about everything on purpose: Brendan O'Neill (and the rest of the ex-Living Marxism gang who pivoted from Marxism to Libertarianism without ever passing through sanity)

All over television until he had served his purpose and then invisible: Nigel Farage

And of course, reprimanded as a journo for lying about Europe too often; paid more for a weekly column than as a Minister: Boris Johnson

The echo chambers haven't gotten worse at all. They've become easier to observe in action and quantify, because social media is leaving a giant digital trail that everyone can observe (whereas previously the average person didn't leave much of a partisan trail/record for observation or study or reporting). The perception that the echo chambers have gotten worse is merely the horror of seeing the already existing echo chambers in action so vividly now that everything is recorded and everyone has a bullhorn.

With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement in their platform.

Additionally from my perspective, it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism, where people identify with a specific group and are more and more unwilling to find common ground with one another or to even have respect for differing viewpoints. Things are only seen as black and white, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong, and must be silenced.

People still have neighbors and coworkers.

> Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.

The choice to isolate yourself in a like-minded bubble was always available.

On the right: most church communities in small midwestern/southern towns will make social media bubbles look like veritable cornucopias of diversity. Or if you have to live in a larger metro, you can very easily find pockets of people who all attend the same church, work for the same few employers, live in the same zip-code, etc. At my first employer (small finance company in the rural midwest) I joined a church because it was the only way to fit in. I think it's fair to say that the majority of the private K12 schools in the USA and the majority of the home-schooling community are explicitly about isolating your family from the out-group.

On the left: same thing. Live in the city, in particular neighborhoods within the city, send your kids to the right montessori, attend a liberal mainline church (or no church), etc.

I don't think there are more people isolating themselves in bubbles. It's just way easier and far less painful to moan about social media than to point out that a huge fraction of our built world and social infrastructure has the effect of forming various types of bubbles.

Social bubbles make it hard to maintain a huge coalition, because disagreeing with any one part of the hive mind can make life in the bubble unbearable even if you are happy with 90% of the other stuff (e.g., if you're socially and fiscally conservative except that you're openly gay, then the rural midwest church is probably a bubble you'll leave). Precise targeted and personalized advertising doesn't have that attribute.

"Reverting" implies it ever left. Is it not possible that our media system, in the past, just enforced uniformity to effectively create one tribe of people who consumed it and excluded everyone else? As the environment gets more diverse, then the existing tribalism, and the conflicts it engenders, just become more evident.

1. Disregard for privacy, by scraping data from people who had not agreed to their terms. And, honestly, from most of the people who "agreed" to their terms.

2. Doubling down on the idea "a candidate should get votes", instead of "a voter should choose the best candidate." It's the classic problem of a measure (vote count) becoming less useful. This has always been the case in politics, but we should discourage it. Not sell it as a service.

I also remember hearing one of their goals was suppressing turnout among voters who likely supported the opponent, but I'm having trouble finding a good source. Even if Cambridge Analytica didn't focus on this, it's another case of the measure ruining its own intent. Voter suppression by official acts is often illegal, but it's not much better when done through legal messaging.

As powerful as Facebook is in the world of American communication, it can't solve those problems. Reducing political ads can help, but we're far from being able to wipe our hands and think we've accomplished much.

However, I find it hard to believe that ads are even remotely the real problem (though they're part of it). They're not nearly as effective at influencing people as friends/journalists/etc and the methods social media uses to reward and elevate angry, tribal content. An endless stream of confirmation bias and strawmen, mostly from other users. Ads are a small part of that river, more likely to be ignored/blocked and more likely to be understood as fiction vs other content. They do have an effect of course, but it seems to be greatly overstated.

Also remember the unprecedented $500M ad experiment Bloomberg ran to little effect. Would $50B even have done the trick? I would bet not.

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/

From the article:

“But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”

But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling. (Not to mention NYT is squarely center right, politically. "Left" of the GOP but not left in any meaningful sense.)

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.

Your contention is that the center is really defined by the progressive/Marxist/"democratic socialist" minority? In that case, I guess anything to the right of that minority (i.e. everything) would be see as right-wing. Unfortunately, that's not the actual center. A better descriptor for those groups is 'far left'.

That makes the NYTimes admitting that it wasn’t that big of a deal more compelling, not less.

1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark.

2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum.

3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.

Even breaking views down as "social" and "economic" encodes a lot of biases. In reality political views seem to align more based on a matrix of dimensions like "openness to novel experiences" or "preference for structure/stability." The system we use often surprises people with how often the Individualist Lefties (of the hippie variety) and Far Right align on both social and economic policy. It turns out their main differences are just about things like sexual mores and recreational drug use, but the general orientation on most other dynamics is the same. They just end up on different ends of the spectrum because of how factional alliances manifest in our political system.

It's not really in the US, where it's been studied and the main dimensions of political variability were a strong economic left-right axis and a weaker racial policy axis (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy), and since that study it's pretty clear that divisions on the race axis have aligned more tightly with those on the economic axis, making the US political spectrum even closer to a unidimensional one.

Just because you are far-left, doesn't mean institutions to the right of you are actually 'right-wing' or 'center-right'. NYT is in no way a 'center-right' publication.

Education on critical thinking skills is a problem in the US, in my opinion. I don't think that needs to lead to 1984-esque "approved viewpoints", though.

I would argue that there is actually an inverse relationship between how susceptible you are to manipulation and how susceptible you think you are.

The only argument I made was that the impact of CA was overblown for political reasons. I don't have a well-formed opinion on targetted political messaging, except maybe that it is a reality and we should just get used to it - perhaps having some regulations may make sense (the way lobbyists are regulated) so that the entire industry doesn't go underground.

>Because if you aren't arguing the latter, I don't think its worth calling OP out on CA specifically.

OP was making a political point - that CA was uniquely bad or an example of the problems of the industry because they were tied to Trump's joke of a campaign. If you actually read what they did, they were clearly clowns and shysters - as in, they siphoned consulting money from the campaign by promising the moon, and couldn't actually deliver. Ironically, their promises were taken at face value after Trump's election.

Cambridge Analytica was targeted purely because they were on the wrong political side, it's as simple as that. Does anyone really think they would have gotten any attention if they were working for Hillary?

But the real reason that I think they were targeted? I think they leaned into it as a submarine PR coverage tactic. "We're so effective that it's a national scandal" was a great marketing tactic in the (hopefully bygone) era when amorality had no consequences.

I could be wrong, but it sounds like you can just turn off all political ads, not those from specific parties.

Of the people that use FB, some percent won't even know that they can block ads from anyone, let alone political ones. Taking only the political ads into account, you then bifurcate the population into those that turn them off, and those that don't know to in the first place.

We've been dealing (poorly) with these filter bubbles already, adding in more filtering may not be the solution here.

I have never have, nor never will, vote along party lines. I am, proudly, unaffiliated.

Voting in party primaries and advocating for change within parties, given the state of affairs in US politics, is a better bet for effective change than maintaining a stance of moral purity.

And when it comes to the "civic duty" level of participation there's honestly not much that to do. You'll know pretty quick whether you're part of the red, blue, or grey tribe so you can just vote by color and then look up what the local ballot initiatives are and vote on the ones that you have an informed opinion on. With this strategy you're the political equivalent of an index fund investor but you're role is still important since modern politics is a game of taking territory.

Granted there is local politics, which I occasionally vote in, but more often than not I am not sufficiently informed in local politics to make an informed decision. If I don't feel I can make an informed decision, why should I vote? My input, if anything, would only add more noise to the process. That doesn't seem productive. I think, when aware of my own ignorance, abstaining from the voting process is the responsible choice.

The will to vote should follow naturally from an understanding of the democratic process and its fundamental implications on society, and the availability of information that can serve as the basis of informed opinions on the subjects of policies. This needs to be promoted for a democratic society to function, and the idea that you must vote regardless needs to die. You should vote, but IMO only as a consequence of giving a damn.

As far as colored tribes go, consider the policies they agree on and evaluate whether they benefit society or not. Reducing political opinion to a matter of "tribes" creates all sorts of room for corruption and socially destructive changes that benefit the ruling class more than its constituents.

Largely speaking pretty much everyone sponsored by a major party is plenty qualified on paper, and candidates tow the party line so close that you don't really need to know all that much to make a decision. Don't get me wrong, it sucks that parties have such a stranglehold on people that people who I'm sure have plenty of complex nuanced opinions are reduced to a color but my distaste for that doesn't change the reality of how they will vote.

First of all, I don't think that forms a very good argument for the idea that "everyone should vote".

Second, that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that you are completely ignorant but harbor misconceptions that make you susceptible to useless or destructive populism, which creates an incentive for opportunist politicians to base their outward facing platforms on that, allowing them to not so clearly and visibly create real opportunities only for themselves.

> But most people aren't completely ignorant, and the return on going deeper in the political process isn't that great if all you're trying to do is decide how to fill out your ballot.

The problem of how to fill out your ballot is not removed from its consequences. If all you want to do is put a name on a ballot, again, please refrain from voting. If you are at all concerned with what your choice entails other than having filled out the ballot, I sincerely believe that you owe it to yourself and everyone else to be informed and to inform.

The idea that politics isn't for everyone (but that voting somehow is) scares me. That politics might not being your "thing" is only true of hermits that have effectively removed themselves from society. For everyone else, it is your thing. What might not be your thing is caring about it, which I think is sad for the same reason someone not caring about their health is.

I don't see why this would necessarily be true. Unaligned votes decide elections, while deeply partisan groups can generally be assumed safe and disregarded. Turnout boosting is a thing, but not generally through policy concessions. Turnout operations are much more about rallying people who already agree with you.

I might be wrong, but my strong hunch is that if you have an hour to spend, volunteering at a party call center is going to pale in comparison to just writing a carefully worded letter to your representative on a specific issue you care about.

Why would you want it any other way? Democracy is messy.

>You are saying this as if those ads state facts and stick to the issues

I'm not saying that at all, but I will say this, political discourse is never about facts and policy. Same with activism. Do you think activists stick to facts and data to prove their case? Almost never. Do you think any housing activists that push 'rent control' as a partial solution to homelessness, care that 'rent control' as a policy has been objectively an abject failure and doesn't actually solve the issue at hand? Politics are emotion-driven and things like 'emotional trust' will outweigh any policy or fact-based discussion.

Sounds an awful lot like giving up to me.

>Do you think activists stick to facts and data to prove their case? Almost never.

There's a difference between "appeal to emotion" and spewing outright lies.

No! The opposite in fact! When Democracy is messy it means there's a lot of 'bumping' and 'turn' (to use some metaphors), unlike the sterile utopia that some push for, where everything is clean and specified and everyone follows a neat pattern (to use more metaphors). For example, I love how messy caucuses are, people are yelling and clamouring, convincing each other to join the other side, negotiating and trading (TALKING to each other), making mistakes, etc. Democratic chaos! Beautiful! But they are going away to just regular, boring voting because this chaos makes many people uncomfortable and it FEELS better to have a top-down, clean, organized, designed approach.

This reminds me of Jane Jacobs [1], an urban activist that criticized the then modern notions of urban renewal which called for creating neat, sterile, single-purpose zoned areas. To her, a city should be 'messy' with active mixed-use neighbourhoods encouraging this 'bumping' and 'mixing'. She's right! And I see this idea of urban planning analogous to the democratic process.

There is a side-benefit to this chaotic Democracy - it's harder to be gamed, by Russians or political consultants or political parties.

>There's a difference between "appeal to emotion" and spewing outright lies.

The other side feels the same about your side.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

I am strongly opposed to caucuses, but not for the reasons mentioned. I'm actually fine with the disorder, the chaos, the shouting.

What I'm not okay with is the time commitment required. It seriously disenfranchises those who cannot afford to take an entire evening in order to vote.

It creates a significant discrepancy between those who are privileged enough not to see the time commitment as a significant burden, and those who do.

(Not to say regular voting is perfect. Look at the recent elections in GA for a counter-example, where voters had to wait in line for hours)

Anyway, none of this is really relevant to your main thesis, but I did want to run down the tangent and present the case for why I think caucuses are bad that doesn't focus on disorder.

I understand your position but this is way overstated. Anything worth doing is going to cost you time and effort and streamlining it will make it lose some important intrinsic property of it.

Approximately 50% of American households carry credit card debt. Do you know why? Because if you truly want something, you'll find a way to get it even if it means financing it will cost you 3x-5x more than just saving up for it. I do not believe that the vast majority of people who care about caucuses would not find a way to attend a caucus.

>It creates a significant discrepancy between those who are privileged enough

I will never buy into this flawed notion of 'privilege' that misinforms more than it explains. Everyone is busy, especially when it comes to things they barely care about. If someone cares about caucuses and primaries they will get engaged and find a way to attend. Evangelicals that care about their faith will find a way to tithe 10% of their income, go to Church EVERY Sunday (not just once every 4 years), and get involved in Church activities. Practicing Orthodox Jews have very onerous stipulations on what they can and cannot do in their daily life, but they care about their faith and therefore they find a way to do those things - regardless of their income and wealth and privilege.

Going to a caucus once every 2 or 4 years on a Saturday isn't a reasonable barrier for those that care. Worrying about those that don't care enough to make time isn't improving things. Your time would be better spent advocating to those people to CARE enough to attend, not destroying the beautiful chaos in order to HOPE it attracts those people into coming out.

What alternative do you suggest?

Berate is a strong word to describe what I read imo. I think it was more a suggestion to put one's self in another's shoes.

If you believe for example that a caucus is not too high a burden of voting for anyone in America because credit card debt exists, I personally guarantee to you that this is due either to a lack of experience in the struggle some Americans face, or to a lack of imagination.

If you actually wanna know, it's easy - check out "Evicted" from your local library.

I dread the dystopia when you sent your party affiliation on your phone and you never even have to think about pesky things like engagement, and people, and politicians, and elections as your phone will be automatically be polled at election time for your vote.

This is a democratic dystopia.

To me, this is democracy: https://youtu.be/FRtp-ooeC3Q?t=139 - yelling, cheering, jeering, people in a common space, interacting with their neighbours, fired up!

> I personally guarantee to you that this is due either to a lack of experience in the struggle some Americans face, or to a lack of imagination.

Personally guarantee eh? I can personally guarantee you don't know what you're talking about. I noticed a tendency of a certain class of people, typically who grew up in an affluent household, who are deeply uncomfortable with making any statement that doesn't infantilize people of modest means or modest upbringing. Frequently they will also lecture others who are familiar with growing up poor, or in an immigrant ghetto in an immigrant household, as somehow ... not understanding what non-affluence looks like, perhaps because they themselves don't understand it and they lack the imagination to (as you put it).

I understand what growing up as a foreign-born immigrant in working-class immigrant household looks like, and it doesn't change my conclusion. If people, regardless of income, care about caucus they will make time. In fact, they will be happy to. Sacrificing a little for something you care about is a spiritual experience.

This is essentially the "people are poor because they don't care enough to be rich" argument which yes is a valid target of derision.

Spending a day at a caucus could mean more than "sacrificing a little." I do claim you're lacking imagination here - why haven't you considered the case of the single mom who is one missed shift away from missing rent - and by the way, if she misses a shift she just gets fired anyway? Oops, evicted and no income. Job hunting while homeless.

The choice between "participating in democracy" and "having shelter" isn't an actual choice.

Also, I disagree entirely with your premise that a caucus is what a democracy looks like. No consideration for mute or deaf constituents. No consideration for introverts. "But if they cared enough." Sure. And if people didn't do crime, there'd be no crime. The reality is those people just wouldn't be represented by a vote. We can sit on the sidelines and make pointless statements about the ethical inferiority of people that don't want to spend 8 hours screaming at eachother to get their vote registered, or, we can acknowledge reality and build our systems around it.

A good democracy is a mail in ballot at home, guaranteed access to a free and open internet, with weeks of time before it needs to be dropped in a nearby mail box, so I can sit at my desk after work with tea while I thoroughly research before I vote.

No it's not. Don't strawman.

> I do claim you're lacking imagination here - why haven't you considered the case of the single mom who is one missed shift away from missing rent - and by the way, if she misses a shift she just gets fired anyway?

This is a good example of why it's so frustrating to debate this. You're engaging in creative writing and storytelling. You don't know any single mom who couldn't caucus because she was afraid to be fired. You just made her up to buttress your point. Are there working single moms at caucuses - you bet there are. Caucus are also organized and run by caring activists who are sensitive to constituent's needs - do you think they don't attempt to be as accessible as they can? Is that a major issue that affects a significant portion of would-be attendees? You don't know, you just assume it is.

>Job hunting while homeless. The choice between "participating in democracy" and "having shelter" isn't an actual choice.

No kidding it isn't an actual choice, because you just made it up and put it us a false choice. Homelessness is not dominated by people looking for work and unable to find any (and for some reason not having access to various social programs) and therefore being prevented from attending a caucus meeting. Chronic, long-term homelessness is almost solely a result of drug addiction and/or mental illness.

>The reality is those people just wouldn't be represented by a vote.

More making things up. You don't know that. You have a stereotype of working people and you're using your imagination to think of all the ways your caricatures of working people may be shut out democracy. But you don't actually know if this in fact a real problem or just something you think is a real problem. And why wouldn't they be represented well by their neighbours if some specific individual had personal commitments that prevented them from attending?

I get why you're asking me to use my imagination - because you have no other connection to the people you purport to fight for.

>A good democracy is a mail in ballot at home, guaranteed access to a free and open internet, with weeks of time before it needs to be dropped in a nearby mail box, so I can sit at my desk after work with tea while I thoroughly research before I vote.

Says who?

I actually do - my own mom, when I was growing up. I'm talking about my experience.

But hey, don't believe me, here's a journalist that went ahead and got a couple families on the record that are in exactly the situation I just described: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted

> More making things up. You don't know that.

I do know that. That's the reality we live in. Make it easier to vote from home and more people vote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/letting-people-vote-a...

The state of American family finance is far more dire than you seem to be aware: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-americans-are-just...

> Says who?

Says me, with as much earnestness as you say with your desire for a caucus. Except my method, the evidence shows, franchises more Americans. That doesn't necessarily invalidate your argument by the way, you can say you prefer a caucus even though it would disenfranchise some Americans. I don't know if that exactly describes a democracy though.

Anyways thanks for the reply, I am familiar with that book and these arguments. I just don't understand why they should apply to a caucus, which is once every few years, and mostly for more politically-involved folks by definition already.

Until we can achieve that kind of safety net, though, I think it's important that ALL forms of engaging with democracy are available to ALL Americans. The political parties get away with far too much shenanigans imo.

"Time" and "financial stability" is not an absolute measure, but is relative to your level of 'care' about the issue. I don't have 'time' to visit someone I don't care about. I make time to visit someone I do. Someone of modest means who has to work many hours a week and raise kids, won't have time (or 'financial ability') to attend a political rally if they don't really care a lot about it. They WILL make the effort if they did. If they don't care about your political cause, but you go ahead and remove all the perceived barriers, they still won't care, and they will prioritize other things they care about over your political rally or caucus.

That's what you're missing here. You're under the impression that the reason why many people don't attend caucuses is that they aren't able to - that's not reality. As a counter-example, many many many people who have all the free time in the world and all the money in the world, also don't attend caucuses. Why is that?

That the choice exists for others doesn't automatically mean it exists for all.

Doesn't change the fact that there are still Americans that don't have that freedom. Though I wish we all did!

I agree with that. I personally find the trade-off to be unacceptable.

However, I can totally understand people that think the trade-off is worthwhile. I disagree, but very much understand and think a debate is merited.

I strongly disagree with anyone who denies that the trade-off exists.

Well of course the trade-off exists. I never said it doesn't take effort to go out and caucus. It does. Having said that, there are many people with the time and means to attend a caucus (as you would define it), still don't attend a political caucus. Why is that? I'll tell you: because they don't care about caucusing and therefore the trade-off for them (as minuscule as it is) is too big.

So you aren't making any profound argument. What you're missing is the other side of the equation - it isn't just about the relative effort to do something, but more importantly the level of care that people have for that something. That is if people don't care about attending a political rally, they won't attend a political rally even if you remove every barrier you perceive there to be. We see it in elections all the time. For all the talk about structural barriers to voting, black turn out was a record high for Obama because black communities really cared about voting for Obama. Black turnout was not as high for Hillary, because she didn't have the same level of support from the black population.

When people care about something, they will find a way to engage.

I'm going to copy and paste something I wrote earlier, because this response still doesn't address my actual concern:

I actually don't mind the additional barrier that caucuses create that deter the people that don't care that much. If two people are equally able to attend a caucus, and the activation energy of the caucus filters out the one that doesn't care that much, that seems good to me.

But I really very much do mind the additional barrier that caucuses create for the people that are not able to attend them due to their circumstances. If two people care equally, but one doesn't attend because they would lose their job or need to earn enough money for dinner—then I have a massive problem.

---

To reiterate my point: I am genuinely unconcerned even slightly about those you address in this post. My concern is still entirely unaddressed, except for being dismissed as not a problem or shifted to the alternate concern about people who can attend but choose not to.

> I strongly disagree with anyone who denies that the trade-off exists.

You:

> I don't know how to argue that. You created a scenario that doesn't exist.

I don't think I just made this problem up.

https://www.kunr.org/post/what-rights-do-employees-have-cauc...

Anyway, I'm not going to debate whether such a person exists. If you think there exists no such person, we're not going to productively carry the conversation forward.

If you think there exists such people, but it's a small enough set that the merits of a caucus outweigh the disenfranchisement of that set, we can discuss that.

But if your argument is that flat out no such person exists, then we can stop discussing it.

Of course, because you made up that person. You made up the problem. Can you quantify how many people are being prevented for caucusing because they can't take a day off? What are we talking about here, apart from imaginary situations?

>If you think there exists such people, but it's a small enough set that the merits of a caucus outweigh the disenfranchisement of that set, we can discuss that.

That is the argument. It's a big country with hundreds of millions of people. Lots of things are happening all the time. I'm sure a person broke their leg and couldn't caucus, or they found out they were pregnant and were distraught, or their mother recently died, or they couldn't take a day off work, or they don't care enough. So what?! There's an election every 2 years. There are local, state, and federal elections. If you miss one caucus because of life, it's not the end of the world, life happens. Go to the next one. Besides, it's a representative democracy, a single voter isn't dictating policy. Your neighbours and like-minded voters will be pushing for policies you care about. In Democracy, it takes a long time for people to be converted to a new position, so it takes years of grassroots organizing to enact change because every person has their own ideas.

Jesus Christ, you're making it seem like it's China where nobody is able to vote. Or as if it is a crime against humanity if a life event prevents some individual from participating at some political event - to the extent where we need to reform the entire system that worked well for hundreds of years. And by the way, life will happen no matter which way you redesign voting and democracy.

It's a mistake to think all competitors want a competitor they can trick into helping them. What if they just want to see their competition crumble?

> What if they just want to see their competition crumble?

Who cares! Every person will have different motives for doing what they are doing. That's expected. Welcome to Democracy.

Caucuses are impacted by that just as much as any other process.

Small potatoes and inconsequential. Americans don't need any outside help to drive wedges between, they are already at each other's throats.

>The other side feels the same about your side.

"both sides are the same" NO.

The only difference is that spewing outright lies is a large subset of appealing to emotion when it comes to activism, which is itself a large subset of politics.

> Sounds an awful lot like giving up to me.

Democracy is compromise, and compromise at the level of government is messy. It's not giving up, it's jut not giving in to one idea without considering and weighing all opinions.

I deactivated my Facebook account 6 months ago or so for precisely that reason. I was in a "community group" for my neighbourhood and every little thing would descend into an argument you would never have if you were talking in person. For example, a person complained that his neighbour was shoveling the snow from his sidewalk onto the road instead of his yard. Huge 40 person argument began. People act different online.

The article doesn't say they'll allow partisan choice about what to block. Just that they'll give you a bubble disallowing "political" ads. I think the big quibble is how they define "political", but the scenario you're imagining doesn't exist.

And FWIW: maybe all those ads in the Atlantic video you posted are "crazy". Very few of them (none that I saw) are lies. It's routine for a median Facebook user to be faced with screenfulls of misinformation. Zuckerberg was challenged about this directly, and stated that it wasn't his job to act as a gatekeeper.

Personally I find Facebook to be unusable and I'm close to deleting my account. I couldn't care less about information bubbles, I basically started unfollowing all acquaintances that frequently post political articles.

I'm really sick of it and given Facebook's feed is screwed anyway, I would like the option of completely filtering out posts on certain topics, such as politics. Alas Facebook doesn't even give the option of censoring words from that stupid timeline.

The closest we had to this in the past were tabloids but people could more easily categorise those than the thousands of "Truth News Online"-esque articles peddled on social media. It's an extreme torrent of an old issue, we scaled it up.

Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...

So yes, money might be a shady motive behind this hunt but there is also quite a lot of damage that we haven't yet found a way to deal with. And it's causing very real problems, in real life, right now.

Not that these problems were caused directly by social media but they are adding fuel to the fire and it only seems to be increasing now when having checks on them becomes another divisive subject and added as another single-issue partisan bullshit.

That's not even remotely true. The Atlantic put together snippets of political ads over decades [1]. It's pretty crazy stuff. The local stuff, just from personal memory, was even crazier, frequently asserting the equivalent of the opposition being murderers.

>Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...

The problem is that even that perspective is your personal bias which you're using to justify censorship. The other side is bad and lying and therefore they wrong so they shouldn't be allowed to speak.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcjEe9guEIA

To clarify, are you asserting that hiding political advertisements - either by not allowing them like Twitter or by giving people an option to opt-out like Facebook - is censorship?

I often see this presented as a given, but it doesn't ring true to me. Is there some evidence or research I'm missing showing that traditional media is biased toward the Democratic party?

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC tend to favor the Democratic Party. While Fox News tends to favor the Republican Party.

Some of the largest newspapers NYTimes, LA Times, Washington Post, etc tend to favor the Democratic Party. There are a few that tend to support the Republican Party.

When you look at the endorsements by newspapers and magazines you will see that it is overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic Party [0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

Then, consider how owners of 3 of the top 4 most circulated newspapers in the US are conservative: Frank Gannett and News Corp (which owns 2!).

With sweeping political reform, you can have dozens of parties active, each representing a much more fine-grained selection of the US population.

That way, one can be extreme-right and vote for the KKK party instead of the current Republicans which may be too mild for their liking; they'll be represented in the government (and outed for being a racist) and feel like their vote counts, but their influence will be marginalized.

There'll be a room for a Democrats-like party headed by Clinton and/or Biden, and another one more liberal / socialist headed by Sanders. It gives more space for more nuanced policies, and it gives more room for different opinions (whereas the current one is with us or against us, and if you're not cool enough your candidacy has no chance).

Maybe the voter's issue is the power of CDU? Maybe they're just anti-establishment? Maybe they're just voting on specific issues?

Who knows, but it's way better than only being able to put your stamp on one party, and gives a little more negotiating power to the smaller parties when forming coalitions.

I agree with that, but I don't think that advertising will meaningfully impact that. From what I gather political advertising isn't used to change opinions of opposition, it's precisely targeted. It's used to help sway undecided and make your own vote base actually register for voting and vote. People from groups with differing opinions already haven't been seeing the advertisement.

It seems like targeting people committed to the other side wouldn't be a good use of campaign funds? With low voter participation rates, there is a lot more to be gained from increasing turnout for your own side.

The primary elections aren't totally over yet. I'll bet come November you have a different experience.

Anecdotally, I am more likely to be charitable and curious about someone else's views if I'm not surrounded by a lot of appeals to emotion or party loyalty. Watching Republican/Democrat ads doesn't make me more sympathetic to either party, often it's the opposite. Get rid of all of the ads comparing Nancy Pelosi to the devil, and I'll be more likely to engage with the actual issues being discussed. Modern political advertising seems specifically designed to push me into more tribal attitudes.

I won't comment on banning things, but blocking political ads on a personal level may be healthy for at least some people. It's not exactly hard to find political arguments if you search for them. And if you do search for them, you're more likely to engage with people who actually know what they're talking about, instead of conspiracy theorists on Facebook.

It's the same attitude of, 'if you want to learn Javascript, there are better ways you can spend your time than reading random rants online about the death of the web.' If you want to learn conservatism/liberalism/socialism, there are better sources than a Facebook ad.

I think you'll find the horse has bolted on that.

You'll not catch me dead on Facebook, ever. But the feature to turn off political ads sounds great.

We've lived in this world since 2016, if not earlier. The question is how to proceed from here.

That entirely depends on whether you think voter suppression ads are fair-play or not

That's ridiculous, it's not as though Facebook ads are the only source of political information in America. Even on facebook specifically that's not true; everybody's Facebook wall will still be packed to the brim with their friends, family and neighbors still talking about politics. We're talking about politics right now, despite there not being any paid promotional material present in this thread.

Advertisers simply do not fill the vital social role you seem to attribute to them.

Is he good at the art of seeming progressive?

He's hosted fundraisers for Chris Christie, his lobbying group FWD.us had created a GOP-led spin off called "Americans for a Conservative Direction" that supported the keystone XL pipeline, and the decidedly non-progressive politicians Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

So when I hear people say stuff like "Facebook has a liberal bias" or that Zuckerberg himself is progressive, I'm genuinely puzzled.

What we perceive as fact is actually something derived from a lot of open discourse based on a lot of evidence. Removing open discourse based on whether the discourse is fact based is circular reasoning and a chicken & egg problem. It's not fact check, it just becomes outright censorship.

It's my belief that if you want to give a chance to lesser known candidates who are not backed by millionaires and powerful insiders, Facebook was the last option available.

I believe Facebook was one of the last services available to make our democracy more democratic.

I think this move by Facebook will make it so much harder for smaller candidates to have a chance now.

I know there is this perception that without Facebook ads Trump would have not won. I don't believe that at all.

I think Trump won first because of NBC and then because of CNN, ABC, etc. than because of any Facebook ads. Allow me to explain:

A - It was NBC that gave Trump years of national TV exposure and created this myth of this business mogul and business guru with his TV show the Apprentice. So people believed "Make America Great Again" was possible.

B - Trump got about $5billion in free media [0]. Because Trump and all his statements captured so much interests.

C - In 2016 election, about 8.5 million people who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump and about 2.5 million of 2012 Romney voters voted for Hillary [1].

These 8.5 million 2012 Obama voters may or may not have been Fox viewers and as likely watched CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, local news (which are all affiliated).

Did you know the Democratic party will cancel working with you as an agency or entity if you work with any candidates that challenge any incumbents? [2]. Basically if you are a professional or entity doing email campaigns or other work and if you work for any non-incumbent you're basically gone and blacklisted. Are we okay with this? Facebook made it so easy for much smaller candidates with little resources to challenge the incumbents. Now this path is gone.

BTW, in the past 4 years or so Republicans have invested and built this enormousness voter database with email, sms and phone number targeting. I've seen screenshots of it. There are other entity who have built something similar at the DNC or will offer one to the Democrats at the right price. There is so much data out there outside of Facebook to target you.

If a candidate has the budget and all the resources he/she/they don't need facebook to get that kind of targeting.

I had the opportunity to evaluate various vendors and their pitches. What's available now out there outside of facebook is rather scary. Any candidate with large budget can target the audience they want it's the smaller ones who will be eliminated by this change.

Lastly, Trump won because of the message. Trump actually ran economically on the left of Hillary and socially on her right.

The kind of stuff like union jobs/workers protection, which used to be the platform of Democrats is what Trump ran on. Everyone talked about the wall, and racism. But many Americans who have been gradually marginalized and seeing every product that used to be made in USA was now coming from China and blaming their jobs lost to Mexico because of NAFTA wanted to hear Trump's message. I know for us in the Bay Area or in NY, this doesn't matter, but I believe it's because we are out of touch with the rest of the country. This is why I had predicted Trump win during GOP primary and his national win. I spoke with random people in various parts of the country. Once they felt comfortable with you, they had a positive view of Trump and how he would somehow come and rescue them. He fooled them, but the message resonated and Trump got $5 billion in free media coverage. That's why he won, because of the places like NBC, CNN, FOX, etc.

You can talk about the small narrow of victory by which Trump won places like Michigan and if Facebook wasn't there he would have not won. I'm not sure about that at all. I think this facebook narrative distracts from the bigger picture, which Trump won on the message that years ago was part of the Democratic platform and he got his message across for free using the mainstream media.

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[1] http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2019/03/22/house-democratic-leaders...

Interesting to see what happens in the upcoming election since he failed to deliver worker protection (but found plenty of time to let pro-corporate judges get more power).

Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.

It seems a little nuts that I'm not allowed to endorse my preferred candidate because my endorsement has value and my candidate hit their cap.

Or have an independent panel measure the media exposure of each candidate. Then compensate them accordingly.

And people who are not candidates and who want to express their opinion, they can: (1) vote, or (2) be a candidate. What they can't do is buy media time or advertisements, etc., which many wouldn't equate with "free speech" anyway.

Just as I rarely see petitions for "equal and free advertising for all candidates" I rarely see "hold authorities accountable for their actions". Sure there's related arguments among the clammer, but never hear it stated that simply.

Wouldn't that disproportionately remove only young urban democrats from political advertising?

also, how come the news of this change only came from a non-american news source?

If that were the case, it might actually be beneficial to Democrats since they wouldn't waste money advertising to those people meanwhile Republicans wouldn't be able to change their minds with advertising.

Or it could go the other way, and inability to constantly be reminding those people how great the dems are and how important it is to vote means the turnout will be lower among those who turned off ads than if they hadn't been able to.

(And I agree with everyone saying that FB cares more about making bank from the election than about actually improving the situation.)

This means the revenue KPI of the ads team would go down right? So will never happen.

Because on the other hand, as a political activist I know how incredibly hard it is to get your message out there. I mean just the hard facts that people might not know about, and our suggested solutions.

The internet and social media provides a slightly leveled playing field: Sure a small social movement can never compete against a billion dollar campaign, but this is a pareto-law distribution where they quickly hit diminishing returns. With a few well timed Twitter posts I hand can reach thousands of people. In the pre-digital world, we would have had to print thousands of flyers, tried to get into newspapers etc..

I find it frustrating and damaging to democracy that politics is viewed as something dirty. Politics should be just a domain of problem solving and discussion like programming, home improvement, or cooking - except that everybody should have a say since it affects everybody. Why do we assume everybody in politics has sinister intentions?

I just have to take a step back from this for a second, because I really, really dislike the concept that other people have decided that I need to be politically educated (and through Facebook ads, no less). Goodness. If you wish to view political ads, or adds for dog hair brushes, by all means, go for it. Do not attempt to force me to do so.

If you want to know where the assumption of sinister intentions comes from, read your comment again: you want to decide what I see.

I think the idea to educate the people on general political issues is not too foreign to the US, at least I've seen many PSAs there, which they don't have over here.

The idea is not to force anybody to watch anything. My idea would be akin to putting up an informational poster next to an advertizing poster outside. But I've made the experience that in many places you literally can't put a billboard up or run a radio ad if it has political / "world-view-based" content - such as talking about unions, rent control, atheism etc. - whereas it is fine to advertize beer or dog hair brushes or any other product.

Conversely, now many platforms actually "force" you to sit through an ad before you get to your content. Tell me, why is it OK if that clip is an ad for some random beauty product, but sinister if it is about the pros or cons of wind energy?

What I'm envisioning is not "forcing" anybody to view anything, but for example changing the display algorithms of social media. Let 10 percent or so be an unbiased selection of posts showing different world views. I'm sure the text analysis algorithms could provide that.

But yeah, I'd find it beneficial for society if I could get more eyeballs on non-commercial, important-for-society topics. This is the same reason I occasionally hang up a poster in a public place. And I honestly believe it is good if someone passes by my poster and reads it on their way to work. (They are also free to ignore it!)

My guess is that you would answer no to that, that such a thing would not be permitted. And so it begins ... who vets such a thing? And we are back to the issue of making Facebook (or anyone else) responsible for some kind of monitoring of what is and is not allowed.

Those kinds of classes exist in the US. In my high school the course was called "Government," but I think it's sometimes called "Civics." It was only one semester, but I'm pretty sure the basics were touched on in Social Studies classes in younger grades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_education_in_the_United_...

Because politics, at least at the top levels, has been perverted by lobbying.

Your ideal of politics seems to be that of people trying to figure out what choices and compromises need to be made. I'm sure most politicians start out like that, but once they get to office, they see that fundraising for reelection is their #1 goal, full stop.

A minor nit pick: I think you're correct that reelection is their #1 goal, but fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically.

False, see Cambridge Analytica.

Um, elaborate? You literally cannot buy votes. If I'm a left wing progressive, no amount of money will convince me to vote for a right wing politician (and vice versa).

Also, by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated.

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/

From the article:

“But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”

If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show me what that system is, and I'll try and use it to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Watch The Great Hack. It's not about targeting people who are thoroughly entrenched in their views like you. It's about targeting swing voters

>If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show me what that system is, and I'll try and use it to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Read up on Social Engineering. Victor Lustig "sold" the Eiffel Tower twice using social engineering tactics.

1. I've watched it.

2. You need to actually summarize here why it corroborates your argument. If I am attempting to refute your point of view, "Google it" is an extremely unconvincing line of argument.

3. Again, I provided you my sources directly, which show that it has already been reported that CA's impact on the 2016 election has been greatly overstated.

> It's about targeting swing voters

Sure, and? I can persuade someone of the most incorrect or immoral point of view, and there's not much you can do to prevent me from doing that except to try and make your own case to persuade them back. That is the consequence of living in a free society in which information can be freely disseminated. You cannot conflate persuasion with "buying votes". Is the New York Times "buying votes" by using their financial resources to report with a particular bias? Is Fox News "buying votes" when they do the same? No! They are publishing speech and advertising to try and persuade voters, as is the point of free expression.

While you're right that money affords one the platform to disseminate their ideologies, at the end of the day, ordinary voters need to accept that ideology, go to the ballot box, and check the box next to the name. No amount of money will install a leader that cannot convince voters to vote for them in a democratic election.

You don't think money is persuasive?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

If you don't believe me, I'll start with anecdotes, and then close with data.

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.

In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).

Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.

Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both. Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.

Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.

Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).

Decades of research[2] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[3] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[4]. Even the studies[5] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins. In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.

Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415

[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

[5] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf

As Alvin Toffler wrote in Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, and as evidenced by GOOG and FB, information and attention are the new money.

>Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.

Those statistics dont factor in the absurd amount of attention liberal media paid to Trump throughout the election. His antics, and the attention it garners among their target market, are great for their bottom line

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powershift_(book)

Yes, this has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the free press (or in your words "liberal media"). That's entirely my point.

You also seem to keep citing books as though they are somehow equivalent to peer-reviewed academic research. Books aren't peer-reviewed, anyone can publish their opinions. Publishing houses are not staffed by true peers of the author, and are ill-equipped to check information. While books are good and important, they are not authoritative for the discussion at hand.

I provided more than enough academic research, statistical results, and empirical results in recent history. Unless you can do the same, your entire argument is based on your personal perception of the world.

>Yes, this has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the free press (or in your words "liberal media"). That's entirely my point.

Nahhh; corporate media is very much concerned with money. No amount of academic research, statistical results, or empirical results can help you make sense of the world if you can't make assumptions based on common sense perception.

You have that COMPLETELY backwards. "Common sense" perception is extremely flawed because the perception of individual humans is limited by their own experiences and forms an incomplete picture of the truth. If your argument is that "common sense" (common according to who?) beats empirical data, it's no better than religion.

I know people have a mindset of wanting to be on the winning team and not waste their vote on somebody who can't possibly win because they didn't spend enough money, but if that's really more important to you than lobbying, then stop complaining - you're getting what you want at the expense of something you want less. Maybe you can't have your cake and eat it too in this situation.

Over the last 30+ years I've seen both parties flip flop on foreign military intervention, gay marriage, states rights, big government, judicial appointments, filibusters, corporate bailouts, government surveillance, militarizing the police, etc. and the list goes on. Both parties have been rhetorically and legislatively on both sides of these issues depending on their position of power.

The one thing that is consistent is that the two parties blame each other and the party that's out of power tries to complain and obstruct until they get back in power.

So, after a while it is easy to look at millions of donations following in to influence elections and the flip flop of positions and be skeptical of anyone who thinks they can affect change without changing the way government and elections ultimately work.

But it is exceptionally difficult to get past the constant battle for share of voice, for power, my tribe vs. your tribe, and down to the brass tacks of problem solving.

Ads are just an opportunity to sling more mud and incite rage. I want to see some content that I as a voter can actually inform my opinion with. Fair, even, and well-organized to support voters.

Not only that, but it moves people toward having an educated opinion, not getting all gassed up on rage-bait.

At least in the US political ads are full of negativity, distortion and wrong “facts” so I don’t think they contribute at all to a healthy discussion. I think the country would be better off if it severely limited all political advertising. Won’t happen because of first amendment though.

Exactly. I wouldn't mind seeing the actual ads, and getting a first-hand impression on what the candidates are campaigning on. What I do NOT want to see -- which is why I quit Facebook -- are the insane and conspiratorial comments and posts ABOUT the political ads.

the vast majority of what passes through twitter is wholly unnoticed by the public if not many of those who use the service.

the idea of blocking political based advertisements is pretty much defeated by news stories of which many are political.

I am all just for putting a banner, border, or cigarette style label, on all ads with the ability to click anywhere on the border to hide that ad permanently.

Not everyone in politics is willing to be honest about what that agenda is, and rarely are they held accountable for misinformation used in pursuit of that agenda.

Whenever I see a political ad, I can choose “don’t show me any more ads from XXX” and it actually works. This was a godsend during the primary and I wish was available in other platforms.

I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.

As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...