On May 24, 2018, social media giant Facebook rolled out its ‘fix’ for political campaign ads. In the wake of last election’s Russian ad scandal, the new requirements were intended prevent foreign groups from using Facebook ads to manipulate US politics.
Fly, meet shotgun blast. Enforcing those rules means deciding which posts are political, which has turned out to be problematic for loads of indy and mainstream publishers, most of whom had no clue they were about to be swept aside in the name of clean elections.
It’s not an anti-left or anti-right thing by Facebook; it’s an equal opportunity argument for stupidity.
The new policy on political advertising applies to “any national legislative issue of public importance in any place where the ad is being run.” Categories expected to require authorization includes issues like “abortion” and “guns” alongside broader concepts like “health,” “environment,” and “values.”
And God forbid you should mention voting.
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This post started out as a comment on OshKoshDave’s dairy: Facebook Deems Factual Global Warming Video Too Political. MeteorBlades responded, saying this deserved to get a wider audience as a post.
I certainly couldn’t say no to one of my DKos faves, so here it is. It’s expanded just a bit, along with added screenshots, in case anybody who could actually do anything just happens to see it.
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Some explanation is in order. (And yes, this practice really sucks)
Let me share what I’ve discovered. Since June 4, 2012, I’ve posted a daily (M-F) politics column at the San Diego Free Press. I have a whole wall full of awards from the local chapter of the Society for Professional Journos and am generally well-regarded in progressive circles.
Here are my posts from last week:
The point is: I’m not looking to subvert democracy or unleash the Kraken on innocent victims.
And Facebook isn’t looking to ‘censor’ me or anybody else in the legal sense of the word. It IS responding to the degradation of democracy by tamping down on viewpoints in the hope the political pearl-clutchers of the nation will leave them alone.
What Facebook is doing is not allowing content to be “boosted” (their word for promoted). It’s something you pay for. The company displays what appears to be a good return on your investment, but if you drill down or cross-check you’ll see they have a distorted sense of what an impression is.
None-the-less, lots of small publishers use it. We all need eyeballs. Obviously, this one-size-fits-all policy of shutting down news & op-ed posts doesn’t affect the New York Times and their kin.
Lots of legit news sites, including my local NPR outfit, are getting caught up in the dragnet. The algorithm they’re using reacts to *words,* not context. Reviews of appeals are (probably—either that or there’s no literacy requirement) done at offshore locations, and they don’t care about context either.
The words “vote,” “voter,” “voting” are typical of the words flagged. That’s how the “Progressive Voter Guide for San Diego” primary elections I worked on for six months got bounced.
San Diego Free Press is a non-commercial site unaffiliated with any business, organization or party. The money to pay for the boosts (usually $20) is charged to my Visa card. I’m retired, disabled, and live on social security.
The automated nature of this screening allows Facebook to go back in time to before the policy was in place to deauthorize past promotions. A literate human might notice these articles are old news. Thank goodness they haven’t figured out how to make all those folks who read my past work “unsee” it.
The “appeals” process ends after one try. It’s also automated. No matter what you say, the same response gets sent. A second attempt gets your case marked “closed.” There is no place, no email, no phone number where you can press your case. The message is loud and clear: you’re f*cked.
What Facebook wants is to force publishers to register and prove they’re not bots. It might even be a reasonable idea, applied with some sense of fairness. As it is now, you only find out after your posts get bounced, which means if they have any news value, they’ll be worthless before you can get things worked out.
I’ve gone through the process and been “authorized.” My first boosted post --about a voter registration effort at Comic-Con--after proving my existence was pulled down. I appealed. Once the sign-up campaign aimed at young people was largely over, the post was reinstated, meaning I was now paying for ads appealing to nobody.
Facebook sucks. And their algorithms don’t care if you use that particular phrase.
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POSTSCRIPT: Lots of people hate Facebook. I get it. Count me in.
But until something else comes along--and the lords of Silicon Valley have made sure that won’t happen—it’s a necessary utility for indy publishers without deep pockets.
This article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation gives a good technical overview of what it would take to solve some of Facebook’s privacy and monopoly issues. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the social media platform’s blindness towards the needs of us small guys. Fixing that problem would take a human being, and as I’ve already explained, Facebook doesn’t do customer relations.