14 votes

Topic deleted by author

3 comments

  1. vord
    Link
    This is shady as hell. It's functionally no different from hiring a botnet to feign support for you. It's actually worse now that I ponder it, since a botnet will appear as random strangers, while...

    This is shady as hell. It's functionally no different from hiring a botnet to feign support for you. It's actually worse now that I ponder it, since a botnet will appear as random strangers, while this exploits the inherit trust that comes from having personal relationships with people. Maybe it would be mitigated if every message was prefixed with "Bloomberg has paid me to say."

    I talk about Bernie to friends, family, and random strangers on the internet because I love his policies and see that he has the track record to show that they're genuine goals of his. The closest thing I got to being paid was a free sticker in the mail. Hell, I just paid $5 (plus shipping) for a yard sign and a 10 pack of leaflets to encourage me to talk to random strangers on the street about Bernie.

    If your candidacy can't build that level of organic hype, is instead resorting to buying endorsements, you should probably be in jail, not running for president.

    11 votes
  2. Deimos
    Link
    This is quite interesting when you combine it with Facebook's recent waffling about what to do with political advertising being posted "unofficially" by influencers. From Casey Newton's newsletter...

    This is quite interesting when you combine it with Facebook's recent waffling about what to do with political advertising being posted "unofficially" by influencers. From Casey Newton's newsletter yesterday:

    Over the weekend, a familiar debate broke out over a Facebook policy decision. The company announced that ads made by influencers, on behalf of politicians, would be allowed on the platform so long as they were labeled as ads. The company will not, however, put those ads in its Ads Library, where they can be reviewed by the public. It’s not clear that anyone will review those ads outside of Facebook, as the Federal Elections Commission, which regulates political advertising, currently has no policy on influencer marketing. The influencer posts can be fact-checked, unless they contain the speech of a politician, in which case they cannot.

    Got all that? Great.

    I don’t know why you would build a whole public ads library, require a certain subset of posts to be labeled as ads, and then exempt those ads from your ads library. I also don’t know why you would invite a fresh nine months’ worth of news cycles over unlabeled viral political ads from influencers, false political ads from influencers that are not fact-checked due to the presence of candidate political speech, and so on. The situation would seem to pit the company’s integrity teams against their advertising teams, with the advertising teams winning all the most important battles.

    7 votes
  3. tlalexander
    Link
    Billionaires should not exist.

    Billionaires should not exist.

    13 votes