Easier to sell ads if users don't have to deal with differing opinions. Arguments are hard to avoid and disrupt the casual consumption experience.
Conservative voters probably represent a much smaller portion of facebook's user base than liberal voters, given facebook's age demographics.
There is definitely an assymetry in what kind of hard-line political pages are likely to get banned. They have relaxed a bit in the last few months, but many political pages constantly have to worry about "getting zucced".
If I’m not mistaken, since politicians usually avoid objective statements — such that they could be construed as truth or lie depending on your point of view — for Facebook to get into the censorship business would be a signal that they aren’t an open platform and they would become liable for any lies or harmful information they missed.
And it’s money: as Zuckerberg said on Capitol Hill, Facebook makes money by selling ads. Specifically, they can charge a premium for targeted ads because they know so damned much about everyone on their platform. Want to blast an ad to promote your campaign to everyone? Standard CPM rates apply. Want to target left-handed hikers who drive a GMC truck, are allergic to penicillin, like Reggae music and NHL hockey? Facebook can give you that list almost instantly but it’s going to cost a LOT more than the standard CPM to run those ads to that group. THIS ability is what makes Facebook so valuable to advertisers and to Facebook shareholders.
Facebook make an irrelevant amount of money from political advertising.
If they didn't really believe that it was important to allow on their platform, then they would have banned it years ago, as it causes them nothing but bad press and blowback.
I think most people just think Facebook ads should be held to same as older media like newspapers and tv that have to have an editor review the ad and approve it before it can be published. Facebook is being used as a disinformation platform and Zuckerberg thinks it’s more important to keep making money. I don’t think that trade off is worth what it’s doing to society. I think Facebook has a large share of the blame for making political discourse worse.
I’m not sure I agree it’s such a big problem, other than having to upset some advertisers by declining advertisements that used to get automatic acceptance. Remember, Facebook is still a private enterprise and they’re under no obligation to make everyone (or anyone) happy. They are free to limit activity they find inconsistent with their moral view, just like Apple does.
And also keep in mind, these are ads we’re talking about. People who want to publish political speech can still do so on their own pages or status updates, but they won’t get paid distribution into users’ news feeds.
Facebook could just ban political advertising for a year. They don't stand to lose a lot of money, just political influence. It would be a smart move though that would shut the mouths of their rivals in the press.
0.5% puts in context that if a small drop in facebook usage would make the political ads a net negative. Just 1% of users dropping facebook in protest, or a small percentage of users reducing their usage because of fatigue from politica adverts would make political adverts not worth the cost. The tiny share of revenue for political ads is going to jeopardise the massive majority of revenue.
The real underlying issue we need to address is that it's nothing to do with revenue. Facebook has a political position that nothing may be out of bounds for facebook. Facebook must be everywhere, everything must be on facebook and that must be acheived at all costs. It's an obviously morally repugnant position, but nonetheless, it's not being challenged.
I wonder what percentage of Facebook's revenue comes from political advertising? In an ideal world, I'd like to see all political advertising banned from their (and similar) platform.
I think this comment gets at something that has been bugging me about the Facebook advertising problem: I still don't see it as a problem.
Yes, I disagree with dishonest political ads, and wish they didn't run on Facebook. But I don't see the need to change Facebook. As long as their terms of service are honest, I think they should be allowed to do whatever they want. If people don't like it, they can leave.
You might be right, but I think banning political ads would probably lead to people doing even more massive political astroturfing campaigns within facebook using the funds they would've spent on facebook ads.
So facebook goes from having a political ad problem where at least they get paid, to having a political manipulation/content problem (well a bigger problem than they already have) that they still have to solve but don't get paid for.
I have hard time believing that selling Facebook ads is a high risk (at least from a financial standpoint, maybe from a democratic standpoint yes) effort. In 2010, Facebook had 500 million monthly users and there wasn't even any kind of a serious privacy legislation like GDPR to curtail Facebook's plan on monetizing user data. I can't imagine there were many executives at Facebook losing sleep over this.
I think it is more true that political polarization is used to make ad targeting more effective. Almost nobody uses Facebook to drive opinion or do "branding." Instead, they let Facebook target some campaign to the audience that maximizes ROI. All of the political Facebook ads you saw last year were fundraising ads, and the small net yield (revenue generated minus Facebook cut) was used on other platforms to pay for ads attempting to sway the few percentage of the electorate that was persuadable. Similarly, Exxon is paying for some sort of action on the part of the targeted consumer, not trying to change minds.
Political ads are not inherently bad though. Ads in general are not actually.
Ads help political candidates to get the word out...i think that’s useful and I think it’s awesome that Facebook didn’t go the route of less resistance (banning political ads) here and rather is trying to get this right!
Political ads a a tiny slice of FBs revenue...so I don’t believe they are profit motivated here.
$1B was spend on digital ads in the 2016 presidential runs and Facebook has a 19.6% market share so probably pulled in about $196M which is about 0.35% of their annual revenue...so I don’t think they are in it for the money at all
If I, working there, found that FB was painful to work with, I'd go somewhere else, as simple as that. I won't spend two days wrestling with FB to see if my ad it's ok or not.
I may not care for political advertising, since my client is not looking to "make a profit" like a traditional customer. But I definitely do for an eCommerce brand for example.
Most agencies use FB because it's easy to work with and it's cheapish with a little expertise. If that dissapeares then nobody is goung to pour money on it.
Those aren't even all separate points. At the end of the day, Facebook is beholden to republican (not really "right wing" per se) advertising dollars more than it is to spending on opposing points.
This is just for demographic reasons: Facebook has to compete hard for eyeballs among young/urban/techie/minority users. Those folks are fickle with their tastes and willing to try more platforms. And they're less sensitive to advertising in general. Facebook has lots of them, but they certainly aren't dominant in that market.
But old white folk? They're all on Facebook. Really, they're ALL on Facebook. Facebook probably has 90%+ of all social media advertising revenue in this demographic. And they skew heavily republican.
So who's interests are they going to serve? When Facebook's executives feel pressure to put their fingers on the fact check scale, in which direction are they going to tilt it?
With magazines, television etc you are targeting everyone. So if you run an ad that said "Vote for me because I will build a border wall" then you will attract 30% of the population and alienate the other 70%.
With Facebook you can just target that 30% whilst guaranteeing the 70% won't be affected since they won't see the ads. That is the feature that is unique to Facebook that is causing all of the problems.
I think it is more about the targeting. Anyone can see what Fox, CNN or MSNBC are saying but Facebook ads can be targeted practically to the individual and few know what messages are being shown to others.
The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.
Conservative voters probably represent a much smaller portion of facebook's user base than liberal voters, given facebook's age demographics.
There is definitely an assymetry in what kind of hard-line political pages are likely to get banned. They have relaxed a bit in the last few months, but many political pages constantly have to worry about "getting zucced".
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