The news: Facebook has announced that people will soon be able to opt out of seeing political adverts on its platform. It will start giving a small group of US users the ability to hide adverts from candidates or political action committees in their Facebook or Instagram feeds before expanding it to all US users and several other countries in the coming weeks.
In an op-ed in USA Today, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said users will still be reminded to vote, and the company aims to help 4 million people register. “I believe Facebook has a responsibility not just to prevent voter suppression — which disproportionately targets people of color — but also to actively support well-informed voter engagement, registration and turnout,” he wrote.
Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Facebook is trying to respond to one of the biggest criticisms it’s faced in recent years, including from the Biden presidential campaign—that it exempts political adverts from its fact-checking program, thus letting politicians lie without consequence on its platform. Letting users opt out doesn’t change that.
And that’s not all: It also doesn’t deal with another common claim about online political ads, which is that micro-targeting voters by area, age, or gender is unhealthy for democracy, as it reduces accountability and lets misinformation spread quickly. Social media companies have diverged on this issue. Twitter stopped accepting political adverts last year. Its co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said: “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/30NyJba
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