A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.
American Cancer Society is a good example of an organization that is clearly, unambiguously political, but which most people probably don't want banned.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
My guess is that it depends how it is phrased, the imagery and the landing page. "Donate now", ok. "Donate now to keep NRA working for you", ok. "Donate now so we can fight policy XYZ", probably not.
This is really interesting, because it seems that in some cases (ex. NRA or EFF) it doesn't actually matter what the ad copy is. It's very clear why they're soliciting donations (to lobby for their ideological viewpoint).
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.
I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal.
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.
Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.