From the American Booksellers Association:
Facebook’s attempts to regulate political advertisements on its social media platform have made it more difficult for bookstores to “boost” author events. Boosted posts are those which have been paid for to ensure that they reach a wider audience.
In early June, A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, encountered a problem when trying to advertise author events on Facebook. The bookstore’s events coordinator, Gretchen Treu, requested to boost Facebook posts to promote two author events only to find that they were rejected on the basis of what Facebook characterized as their “political nature.”
The rejected posts are an outcome of a new Facebook political ad policy. The policy, which went into effect in May and applies only to ads targeting an American audience, was established to prevent foreign individuals or groups from running Facebook ads to influence U.S. politics. In order to pay for a “political” ad, advertisers must become authorized to do so. The authorization process includes submitting a government-issued ID and providing a residential mailing address. The new policy represents Facebook’s voluntary compliance with the proposed Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ) that subjects online political advertisements to the same rules as ads sold on TV, radio, and satellite.
“Here, Facebook’s solution might be worse than the problem,” said David Grogan, director of the American Booksellers for Free Expression, Advocacy and Public Policy for the American Booksellers Association. “While we are sympathetic to Facebook’s attempt to filter out false news meant to influence our democratic process, attempts to regulate or control speech will usually result in unintended consequences. And in this case it has, as bookstores that are advertising important author events — critical to the free exchange of ideas — are censored indiscriminately alongside foreign actors. Facebook needs to go back to the drawing board on this policy.”
The posts in question advertised events with Ijeoma Oluo, promoting her book So You Want to Talk About Race (Seal Press), and Cecile Richards, discussing her memoir Make Trouble (Touchstone Books).
Link to the rest at the American Booksellers Association
Hmmm. Unintended consequences. Who woulda thunk it?
Maybe this guy.
The problem is, everything is political if you dig deep enough. Even children’s stories turn out to have a political angle which tends to become more apparent as society changes and their underlying assumptions look different in the light of newer generations.
Most people think of politics in terms of party politics, laws, and individual politicians. But it’s all about power, and the struggle for control is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour that we can’t get away from – imagine how boring our fiction would be without it!
I don’t know how Facebook is going to get around it, and the other problem is that all ad platforms will need to be regulated in a similar way to ensure fairness. Yet there isn’t a workable definition of “political” that everyone can agree on.
In the UK we have “purdah”, a period before elections of reporting restrictions on public broadcasters and restrictions on councils and government that ensures fairness. If you look at what the BBC reports on election day (besides the fact that it’s an election) that gives a good indication of the kinds of things they consider non-political. However, that’s just one body, whereas Facebook’s ad policy is going to extend to countless organisations, many of which will be testing the boundaries.
I think the real problem here is that Facebook is relying on a computer algorithm to do a job that is more properly done by humans.
I’m so glad I don’t rely on Facebook for advertising! Or for anything else, for that matter.
Supervisor: Facebook says Greece 4th of July posts “qualifies as political” and blocks them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3667027/posts
……..
Greece is a town in N.Y.
The post were advertising the event.
Well, the 4th of July *is* a political holiday.
It celebrates the signing of a political document, after all, and one that led to tbe founding of a nation where horrible things happened and ensconced all sorts of currently-offensive principles, like freedom of thought, freedom of speech, etc.
Best to avoid offending sensitive people out there…
Heh, a rule/law to stop one thing stops something else as well – who’d have thunk it?
So even with all those (supposed) warm bodies, in the end facebonk’s bots are even as bright as Amazon bots at weeding junk out. 😉