The blog source[1] announcement makes no mention of RT or Xinhua specifically, as enumerated by CNBC. Neither article mentions whether the BBC will be categorized in this fashion.
And so the US draws closed it's Iron Curtains. For the US imply that undemocratic corporations are the arbitrators or truth is laughably absurd. An honest person has nothing to fear from the lies of another.
> An honest person has nothing to fear from the lies of another.
Some problems with this:
1. an honest person in a democracy must fear how ads influence her neighbors, regardless of how they influence her
2. honesty does not buy you an all-seeing eye, so honest people can be fooled by a dishonest person's lies
3. lies are laundered when they are repeated by well-meaning, fooled honest people, so whatever superpowers one honest person has against dishonesty, they are neutralized by this kryptonite
I'm not saying anything that can't be persuasively argued. There are in fact books about this, the most famous being "Manufacturing Consent" which proposes a five pronged propaganda model that ensures media compliance with US state interests. Calling to censor opinions like that shows how narrow liberal opinion is and unwilling to tolerate dissent.
Yeah my apartment neighbor, who is a corporation, broke down crying the other night from all the stress at work and the news. Cried really loudly, could hear through my walls. But at least their ex-wife-divestment lets him see his kids-subsidiaries on the weekends. But he's going to be moving out soon to be closer to his mother, who is a conglomerate and frail, so he can take care of her.
A real tear jerker of a life. But for some reason he never worries about eating healthy -- or eating at all, for that matter. Maybe I should try giving him some body-positive feedback for emotional support.
Bah, you know what, maybe it's my flawed humanism getting in the way, maybe it'll be easier for me to just become a corporation, too.
Woosh. I know the legal definition of Corporate Personhood. This is not the same idea as saying "I believe corporations are human-people", which is what the sarcastic poster was playing with. That distinction is the point of the satire: we all know you meant the former when you agreed with the sarcastic-poster on the latter; hence the satire exposing the absurdity of it.
This brings up an interesting question. How come citizens are deemed qualified and knowledgeable and educated enough to vote for their governors, but not knowledgeable and educated enough to spot fake news and make their own good judgement. This is somewhat contradicting , IMHO
It's not that they're good at picking their government, but that this is the best of awful alternatives. And everyone is capable of being taken in by sufficiently convincing lies. Do we give up and give the liars free rein or do we try to improve the situation? The simplest rough cut to improve the situation is to remove the voices of parties whose interests are clearly aligned against the citizens' making a wise choice. Does Putin want America to be misgoverned? Then maybe he shouldn't be free to spread lies during the election.
There are people who definitely should not be voting. The trouble is… how do we decide who they are? Well, it's as simple as whoops we're in a dictatorship now.
Plus, the unwashed masses might not be very good at deciding who's acting in their best interests… but the set of people who are good at deciding who to vote for has different interests (on average) to the set of all people. So even if there were a perfect way of doing this, it wouldn't achieve what we want it to achieve.
I really want the minimum voting age to be lowered to 7 – it's something my seven-year-old self swore to do. But then parents would basically get an extra vote for each child they have, given how easy it is to control a seven-year-old's access to information and how much trust they place in their parents' judgement, and that would be really bad. So I'm not actually going to support such a measure.
(Rebellious teens, on the other hand… well, perhaps 14-year-olds voting wouldn't be so bad. Except there would then be higher incentives to manipulate them, and do we really want to put 14-year-olds through that? Well… you could argue they're already being put through that, so perhaps? But —)
The think is that "advertisements", "news" and political statements get mixed up.
Like they advertise a YouTube channel/video, but then that YouTube channel/video contains badly manipulative content.
Worse with how thinks developed in recent times on YouTube not even all of this videos have bad intention some have accidental manipulative by oversimplifying reality. Like ... explained in 10 minutes where ... is fairly complex and omitting any of the major parts will have manipulative effects on the opinions people with no knowledge about ... get.
Most scarily is that I have seen some channels providing mini educational videos of this kind which for most topics try to be objective but for some topics are extremely manipulative while convincing you that they just present you the "objective" facts, in a way which clearly is NOT accidental. I'm a 20+ year old student and if I wouldn't have know more about the given topic I would have been tricked by them. So the effect such videos can have on younger people has me worried.
> Facebook announced that it will no longer allow state-controlled media outlets to run ads on its social networks, effective this summer.
Luckily, there is a clear determining factor for what state-controlled means. If it comes from a foreign country's territory, or if it simply agrees with an opinion also held by a foreign nation, it must be state controlled.
> The decision is part of its efforts to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. election.
Because luckily, only foreign states try to influence elections. Luckily, no national meddling ever happened within the USA. It was all Russians, or Chinese looking like Russian.
> Facebook also is starting to label state-controlled media outlets, giving users more information about who owns and runs those entities.
Luckily, Facebook is the perfect arbiter for making such assertions. Only by branding foreign and independent media outlets as such, can the good name and reputation of Facebook and other altruistic independent sources of information be protected by such evil.
We look at several factors that may indicate editorial control by a government, including:
- Mission statement, mandate, and/or public reporting on how the organization defines and accomplishes its journalistic mission
- Ownership structure such as information on owners, stakeholders, board members, management, government appointees in leadership positions, and disclosure of direct or indirect ownership by entities or individuals holding elected office
- Editorial guidelines such as transparency around sources of content and independence and diversity of sources
- Information about newsroom leadership and staff
- Sources of funding and revenue
- Governance and accountability mechanisms such as correctional policies, procedure for complaints, external assessments and oversight boards
- it's privately owned (and hence not required to disclose its owners),
- it has public guidelines and policies promoting transparency, neutrality, independence and accountability,
- its newsroom leadership and staff are careful about what they put on their official Facebook accounts,
- it has an abuse@ address and an internal oversight board, and Facebook has assessed it
then that's okay? I think I'd be able to get an organisation past stronger checks, and I'm not even particularly good at that sort of thing.
That last check is the hardest one to game, but it's also likely to have a high false positive rate, so I wouldn't be too worried about my hypothetical shady organisation getting past that.
Generally I like to remind people of an infamous quote, from a truly nasty period at the beginning of the last century. Because I believe it illustrates the true nature of this fact you pointed out:
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
- Benito Mussolini
It is possible that what (eventually) will go down in the history books regarding the USA, might be how astonishingly effective the decades upon decades of positive propaganda have blinded/confused/divided it's own citizens from noticing the true nature of the machinery that runs the country (and has done so, maybe even ever since WW2).
With a few people and some decent preparation you could probably fake most of this without too much effort.
In fact, I wonder what the smallest amount of people and effort you'd need to get past this: if you can get away without having face-to-face you might be able to pull and do it with 1 person, a bunch of emails and some AI generated faces (inspiration courtesy of https://youtu.be/bqPARIKHbN8 )
Reminds me of the time facebook made that (intentionally hard to use) database of "ads" to show that no manipulation was going on and then removed some clearly manipulative ads with the reasoning that they had not been marked as political ads and as such where not political but "just" illegal ads and shouldn't be in that database.
> The decision is part of its efforts to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. election.
Also surly Chinese, Russia and other propaganda actions will tell facebook that they are media outlets/state sponsored and not just lets say some company trying to sell some stuff.
> Also surly Chinese, Russia and other propaganda actions will tell facebook that they are media outlets/state sponsored and not just lets say some company trying to sell some stuff
Yes they have to, its clearly written in the conditions when you sign-up ;) uh and why not also the UAE? like just russia and china makes propaganda (hello trumpidumpi)
>Luckily, Facebook is the perfect arbiter for making such assertions. Only by branding foreign and independent media outlets as such, can the good name and reputation of Facebook and other altruistic independent sources of information be protected by such evil.
Ironically, "facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth/speech" is exactly the defense Zuckerberg made about the decision not to put a disclaimer on Trump's "looting and shooting" tweet. And people are still killing him over it. At this point, I'm not entirely sure what people want.
So does the concept of dysrationalia, proposed by Keith Stanovich. Ironically, the Wikipedia article quotes Robert Sternberg as saying:
> I am afraid that Stanovich has fallen into a trap—that of labeling people as 'dysrational' who have beliefs that he does not accept. And therein lies frightening potential for misuse.
But when one group of people say "Facebook should be the arbiter" and the other group says "Facebook should not be the arbiter" then both things cannot happen.
It's already happening - you can practically assume any startup formed in the Middle East (ex Israel) or China, is funded by an SWF entity, either directly or in the long chain of command.
I think they should just block ads from non-domestic media outlets instead, that way you don't have to distinguish between "state controlled" or not, just say that foreign states shouldn't run election ads in other countries.
That's incorrectly ordered, Rupert Murdoch wishes he was Mark Zuckerberg. You can see that in the non-stop whining - projected envy - out of News Corp about the power of the FB platform over the course of many years.
Zuckerberg is also ~12 times wealthier than Murdoch (who has a declining empire).
Most recently:
"News Corp Australia blamed Google and Facebook for undermining the profitability of Australian media outlets, including 60 of the company's local newspapers that may publish for the last time next week."
You're interpreting the statement as being about wealth. I'd rather interpret it as being about influence and Murdoch has held more political influence than Zuckerberg and probably still does.
Or limited advertisement to _product_ advertisements if they want to stay objective.
EDIT: And have a completly different "ad" system for political advertisements limited to sources from countries you whitelist defaulting to your country of origin which are all manually "fact", racism checked, and "source" checked etc. What isn't possible for general purpose product adds might very well be possible for political ads.
Operation Mockingbird. COINTELPRO. Edward Bernays.
Historically, the United States has always had actors within traditional media. It is literally impossible to block out domestically state-controlled outlets.
The article seems to focus on foreign state actors, but shouldn't their policies block all political ads at all? I feel like Facebook should just get out of that space entirely if the want to appear entirely safe/neutral (or as much is possible).
Most state-run and controlled media are much more free than pretty much all mainstream media in the US (see BBC). This is FB saying corporations are more trustworthy than state-backed free media which is laughable (see FOX and friends).
This is like adding DRM to computer games. The only one hurt are those who shouldn't be.
The goal is mainly foreign state controlled media, who try to have an audience in the US, or maybe in other countries where facebook has activity. The typical target would be russia today, for example.
In particular the narrow targeting of the political ads seems really problematic.
In Steven Levy's book [0] he goes into detail about this, the Trump campaign would show ads that specifically appeal to certain users while avoiding showing them ads that would turn them off.
If you were in a targeted group known to be anti-immigrant then you'd get the anti-immigrant ad, if you were in a group that was pro-immigrant you might get the tax-cut ad, if you were someone that would never vote for Trump then you'd get anti-hillary ads, etc.
This isn't at all neutral. FB's newsfeed also being algorithmically ordered for engagement (or really any way that's not chronological) is also not neutral. I'm partial to the argument that FB can't be arbiters of what's true and what's not, that people should hear the political speech as long as it's truly coming from those politicians - but this breaks down when FB allows people to narrowly target the message while also manipulating the general feed.
People are only hearing subsets of political speech precisely targeted to manipulate them. It's not informative, it's leveraging confirmation bias and hiding contradictory information.
I generally agree with the point that they're better being neutral, but then they should be neutral and not algorithmically rank for individual user engagement or allow this kind of targeting on political ads. Otherwise they're making editorial decisions as a publisher and should be held to that higher standard.
> If you were in a targeted group known to be anti-immigrant then you'd get the anti-immigrant ad, if you were in a group that was pro-immigrant you might get the tax-cut ad, if you were someone that would never vote for Trump then you'd get anti-hillary ads, etc.
That doesn't seem that different than e.g. tailoring a speech to emphasize whatever polices are important to the city a candidate is speaking in. I could imagine it being a problem if you're presenting completely different policies to different people (e.g. pro-gun to rural, anti-gun to urban) but all political Facebook ads are public and archived so I imagine that would get found out pretty quickly.
I think there’s a difference in kind when it’s targeted this precisely, repeatedly, and at scale.
Most people aren’t going to see a candidate speak in their city, and even if they do - the targeting can’t be as precise. On national TV they’ll see a more general message.
Most people are on Facebook though and vulnerable to these targeted ads.
Even in their city, I think a tailored message is different than an ad tested for engagement in its ability to manipulate effectively (particularly when the candidate also lies, it’s easier to hide lies when you’re selecting people already motivated to believe them, and only showing the lies directly to those people).
In the US any media outlet that sends people to the white house press briefings is state controlled, so basically all of them. There is no mainstream media that isn't state controlled.
Are state-controlled media outlets really the problem? I feel like the issue is ads being purchased by groups tied to state actors (but not necessarily in any official capacity). Also, fake accounts posting misleading information (but not purchasing ads) is also a huge problem.
It's controlled by private people which happen to strongly act in favor of the president. So no. But if you have the same kind of construct in e.g. Russia posting ads for US citizens it surely would count as state controlled....
I wonder if they would include Germans ZDF and similar which are state payed, but at the same time _not_ state controlled.
(Through this doesn't meant they are not biased, not that there are no people with influence which are members of some party of the many parties in Germany which have influence to some of them).
(To quite wikipedia: "It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all federal states of Germany.")
Based on the blog post it seems like they are giving themselves a lot of wiggle-room to include or exclude whomever they like.
If we determine that there are enough protections in place to ensure editorial independence, we will not apply the label. Publishers looking to prove their independence must be able to demonstrate at least:
A statute in the host country that clearly protects the editorial independence of the organization
Established procedures, processes, and protections at the media organization to ensure editorial independence
An assessment by an independent, credible, external organization finding that the statute has in fact been complied with and established procedures have been followed
I'm going to be a little idealistic here, but I would rather see a greater emphasis on media literacy online. Provide the reader with some context and help them make informed decisions. No it won't work on everyone, but it's better than panicking.
Any media source can be illuminating if you know how to read it. RT contains the perspective of the Russian state, as well as a lot of western journalists who are outside the western mainstream for whatever reason. The stories are often embarrassing for western states, but that's fine as long as the the reader knows the intention of the source, and they are aware there is some propaganda mixed in.
How will this affect outlets like BBC, NPR, and others? They’re state funded, if not state controlled to a certain extent. Just listen to people’s attitudes towards the BBC recently. Will they be prevented from taking out Facebook ads? I think I’d prefer that honestly, because I don’t want my taxpayer or TV License money buying Facebook ads...
Do BBC and NPR actually buy Facebook ads? Especially NPR, I feel like it's not exactly the type of organization that would like Facebook or want to do business with them.
I'm not sure why it would be important to allow ads from state media even if generally considered benign. Why not just have a quiet period around the election?
People seem to not be distinguishing between running targeted ads and allowing news to be transmitted. It doesn't seem like the latter requires allowing the former.
> Entertainment, social and international news should be edited in the “right direction”, just like domestic news, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday as he told state media and tabloids to alike to uphold the Communist Party leadership.
> Party-owned media should put political awareness first and let “positive propaganda” be the majority of the public voice, Xi told heads and veteran journalists from media outfits including People’s Daily, CCTV and Xinhua.
> “Party-owned media must hold the family name of the party,” Xi said. “They must embody the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority … their actions must be highly consistent with the party.”
I don't know about BBC or NPR, but VOA and Radio Free Asia are much more borderline. A valid argument can be made that they are not really independent of US government.
There was a Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, but I can't tell if that had any meaningful impact on whether the VOA can advertise to Americans.
(I know Facebook is used worldwide. Can the entities which purchase ads say that their ads must never be shown to people of certain nationalities? Would that suffice in the face of a Federal law?)
As for BBC vs NPR, the BBC is funded by what is essentially a tax, the license fee, whereas NPR is mostly funded through fees, grants, sponsorships, and contributions; in 2012, 10.9% of its funding came from Federal sources.
Does that include party sponsored Medias like fox or cnn or is the hole party situation not recognized as 'state-controlled'?
Sounds like a terrible complicated situation where social-medias are, if i where Zuckerberg, i would just sell the hole thing and live my live, cannot believe that something like that makes fun.
VC founders are usually delusional and think their product changes the world for a dramatic net good, Zuck won't quit because he probably thinks Facebook is the best invention of the century and it needs him at the helm.
Any source of party sponsorship of CNN? Trolling Trump for ratings doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing the bidding of the DNC. Fox on the other hand...
Yes again one-sided, owner of CNN are WarnerMedia and Turner Broadcasting System now you research for yourself what Turner's connections are, and especially WarnerMedia's.
I for one want to give FB the benefit of the doubt here. I think perhaps their hearts are in the right place on this one, and I hope they can define a solid set of guidelines.
It's clear that they're caving to public pressure - all the more concerning because too many members of the public who might be on the other side have themselves been pressured into silence for fear of what the cancel mob can take away from them.
This is good, however, it ignores the fact that the US media is governed by six major entities and each one is strong enough to carry out the intentions of foreign actors.
I wonder how much money Facebook will lose by simply not running ads for say one week. One week before the election, turn off all ads to a particular area, then run ads made by FB marketing for everybody to say vote in the election, I don't care who.
How are they planning to decide which outlet is state-owned ?
Friend-of-Putin Times will happily represent that it is 100% privately owned company that is privately owned by someone who just happens be good friends with Putin.
Facebook's survival is precipitated on globalism and an impotent national identity. They can't have any more China's standing up to Facebook's imperial demands for total surveillance of every citizen. Thus, the globalist BBC will be welcomed with open arms while any entity that wishes to protect their indigenous culture and opposes globalization in any way will now be a "threat" -- it's all rather transparent.
Whow, this would hurt 90% of all media. They clearly didn't think that through, independent media is super rare nowadays.
But now we have an incentive to prove all the media control, and thereby kill them off. Without ads not much controlled media. Only the biggest players which are paid by the state will survive.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/labeling-state-controlled-...
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