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THREAD: Facebook’s election announcement today may appear at first blush to help the left—which will benefit from higher turnout and a full count of mail-in ballots. But the story is more complicated & it may hurt the left in a few key ways. Facebook said:
1. No new ads in week before Nov 3
2. Claims people will get COVID if they vote will be nixed.
3. Content delegitimizing the election-vote by mail leads to fraud will be labeled
4. If Trump or Biden tries to declare victory before final count, likewise labeled
2. Claims people will get COVID if they vote will be nixed.
3. Content delegitimizing the election-vote by mail leads to fraud will be labeled
4. If Trump or Biden tries to declare victory before final count, likewise labeled
But banning new political ads in the week before the election is not as simple as it sounds. First, as @TatendaCheryl points out, we can’t tell young and non-white people “VOTE BY TOMORROW” w/ ads in AZ, FL, GA, MI, NC, TX under this policy. https://twitter.com/TatendaCheryl/status/1301512979494600713?s=20
It’s important to deliver that message to low political knowledge voters that are hard to reach anywhere except Facebook (esp w/ the pandemic). These folks have in the past been targets of foreign election interference.
We've been actively trying to do exactly this and are now hamstrung, at least for the week before election day.
But there's another issue too: promoting news content is often considered political advertising. And removing the ability to pay to distribute news content will likely hurt Democrats more than Republicans.
Why? The answer can be derived from what I will half-jokingly call the first axiom of internet behavior:
Old people tend to click things.
Old people tend to click things.
They click on scams: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/23/new-research-pinpoints-how-elderly-people-are-targeted-in-online-scams.html
They click on fake news: http://www.ask-force.org/web/Fundamentalists/Guess-Selective-Exposure-to-Misinformation-Evidence-Presidential-Campaign-2018.pdf
They share 7x more fake news than younger folks: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/politics/facebook-fake-news-2016-election.html
They click on fake news: http://www.ask-force.org/web/Fundamentalists/Guess-Selective-Exposure-to-Misinformation-Evidence-Presidential-Campaign-2018.pdf
They share 7x more fake news than younger folks: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/politics/facebook-fake-news-2016-election.html
Older folks are more conservative on average. That means they are going to click on and share far right content at much higher rates. So what? That feeds into News Feed ranking, making it more likely that these articles will get big boosts in organic reach.
Organic reach for far-right partisan news is thus almost always going to be far greater than for the far-left, all else constant. So this decision can give far right "news" a big edge in the week leading up to the election compared with far left outlets.
We've found that promoted news content delivered to a low knowledge audience can be more motivating and persuasive than political ads, at least on FB. So, one of the most potentially potent tools we have to counter the far right is gone for "new" news in election week.
AND--how to counter something posted by Trump, who has a massive following? Dems simply can't do it using ads. That means they may not be able to reach an important set of voters, particularly the less engaged. https://twitter.com/kreissdaniel/status/1301565370021687297
While much of this advances the cause of democracy, the new ad ban seems incongruous w/ Mark's comments at Georgetown about the importance of political ads on the platform: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/