Restricting the categories for political advertising is certainly a move in the right direction. It will reduce the power of digital advertising to that of traditional media. It may not be a welcome move by some political parties but overall it could allow for good ideas from rival parties to have a wider reach rather than 'preaching to the choir' as it were. The dissemination of good ideas might become more democratic.
However, the idea of removing ads because of 'false claims' can only lead to censorship in the future. The list of what's considered false will inevitably grow over time and put a lot of power in the hands of whoever is deciding the 'truthiness' of claims. It isn't difficult to imagine this being applied inconsistently in countries further away from Western politcal norms. This does give Google a lot of power in shaping political discourse and influence outside of US and EU territories.
We know from how they've handled disputes on YouTube, disabled Gmail and developer accounts that this process unlikely have any better transparency than we've seen to date.
I'd argue that political advertising would require greater transparency and I'm not convinced that Google has the capability or the motivation to provide it.
>However, the idea of removing ads because of 'false claims' can only lead to censorship in the future
you might be right, but the reality is that the world has a large problem with disinformation and false claims right now that's causing real negative consequences for real people. Stopping the spread of false information is a good thing that should be done.
Letting blatant lies control our political processes now just to prevent future potential censorship in the future is not a good compromise.
Personally, I'm conflicted. Your argument rests upon the idea that people's minds can be "poisoned" with false information. And I understand that. But at some point you have to hold people responsible for believing stuff that is blatantly false. There was a time that, if you believed in Bat Boy [1], most people rightly thought you were a bozo.
> the reality is that the world has a large problem with disinformation and false claims right now that's causing real negative consequences for real people.
Can you expand on what you mean by this? It seems we have more transparency than ever before into how governments are operating (mostly corruption) and that's a good thing. What negative consequences do you see coming from false claims?
I suspect the answer to this question might highlight why people are nervous about Google (or any company) being the arbiter of truth.
This relies on the assumption that traditional media isn't the source of disinformation and false claims, which at the best of times is far from true and even worse if you happen to live in a country where Murdoch media has a near monopoly.
Then the question is does political advertising make the disinformation problem better or worse and I'm far less sure of that. It's easy to point to a few crazies but their influence is less certain and traditional media has always had plenty of crazy.
That's an unsubstantiated claim. Where is the evidence that fake news (as opposed to speculation, which should be immune to censorship) is a "large problem"?
Politicians and political parties have always lied to get elected. Why political ads on digital sites would be different than analogue ones is what interests me.
> I think the better approach to handle truthiness issues is to give the other party/candidate/candidates a chance to post a rebuttal.
I disagree. That's effectively how modern journalism works where the news is "objective" by letting each side say its piece.
The end result is that the media is easy exploitable. The fundamental problem is that manufacturing lies takes less effort than explaining the truth. The latter is hampered by requiring research, evidence, and consistency. The former has no such restrictions.
That means Party A can spend five minutes saying "Party B eats kittens!" Now Party A has to spend a week providing evidence that no, they do not in fact eat kittens. Meanwhile, Party A has already put out five more press releases about how Party B drinks the blood of infants, was responsible for Firefly being canceled, and wants to raise your taxes to buy bombs to drop on wildlife preserves.
The consequence is that whoever has the least respect for the truth has the greatest ability to control the narrative. See:
It always gets justified with some ideal examples then within a year or two the original rationale is forgotten and it’s being used broadly under pressure from various special interest groups inside and outside the organization.
This sort of thing needs to be black/white which is impossible leaving it full of grey areas where abuse and false positives without due process is a worse trade off than the original intention.
I don't think it's true to say that 'traditional media' is less powerful or less 'individually' targetable. Addressable cable, mail, phones, doors are central to politics and each individually targetable (at small sizes too).
Google is a private company and they should be able eliminate such things though. No government forced them to. If the political powers that be wouldn't have been so ham fisted they might have been able to keep their "things". Now they can't. good on Google (for once). eliminating targeting of the audience by political affiliation is a good thing.
The premise that 'traditional media' is not part of the problem is a terrible one. Censorship is not a good solution to bad ideas. Open marketplace of ideas is.
Just ban them completely or don't bother, I don't want Google to be the judge of the validity of claims as it's perfectly possible to make an add which is 100% made up of technically correct statements but presents a misleading narrative.
Then it comes to the question is there is such thing as a true narrative to begin with as narratives are subjective in nature, this is a can of worms that Google shouldn't open.
So yeah a full ban sure but not this, if they want some sort of a partial ban they should probably have an interface that allows local electoral commissions to vet advertisement and the most important thing I think Google must do is to disable targeted political ads if they continue to allow them in any shape or form.
Do you think that Google should allow an advertisement that claims you have a problem with your bank account and links you to a fake bank login page that steals your credentials?
Do you think that Google should allow an advertisement that falsely claims that a certain candidate has dropped out of the race, or that the election date has been changed?
Do you think that Google should allow an advertisement that falsely attributes words or actions to a certain candidate? (e.g. imagine an ad that falsely claims "Candidate X has changed her position on issue A.")
If you have different answers for some of these questions, then your view is more complicated than "I don't want Google to be the judge of the validity of claims."
I don't think it's correct, the first one is facilitates a defined criminal activity the 2 others are not necessarily criminal (they might be in certain jurisdictions).
There is a huge difference between an "ad" that is designed to compromise a bank account through phishing and a ad that is designed to sway political opinion even if it's untruthful.
In fact out of those 3 the former isn't even an advertisement necessarily despite the fact that it might be presented to the user through "google ads".
Banning them would just further extend the isolation/echo chambers created by social media.
If you have a political message, it makes sense to force you to tailor that message on very broad terms. Hearing something you might disagree with is part of life and very important to critical thinking.
This is not intended to be an opinion on false statements in political advertising.
Paid adverting artificiality maintains and promotes ideas backed by money rather than having ideas become widespread solely based on validity.
If we believe in the "market place of ideas" where validity and accuracy are the sole determiners of success then none should have artificial support. So all ads should be banned. If an idea fails in this market place, then it is reasonable to assume it is a bad idea. Leveraging it is just as bad when done by Soviet approved posters or Exxon paid for ads.
The echo chamber is an example where paid ads will actually _worsen_ the situation: Ads are aimed at target audiences driving them into more extremes by seeing exaggerated or false statement they would not have seen if there were no ads. Also, those echo chambers backed by moneyed interests will thrive and expand while those not money backed will fade. So instead of at least having some hope of uneasy balance between two extremes, you get head long plunge into just one of them.
> Hearing something you might disagree with is part of life and very important to critical thinking.
I believe this is 100% true. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people do not have the skills to handle this. Look at the anger that appears on this site when certain topics are brought up.
So people have a hard time dealing with ideas they disagree with, but I doubt that forced interaction with those ideas will improve the situation.
We can see empirically that the most common reaction is to double down on your own ideas, get defensive, and generally react in a very self-centered and egotistical manner.
That's the current situation. Would banning political ads make this problem worse? I think I can see the logic here - people will only seek out what they agree with.
But it's not like political ads are the only way that they might be forced to see something they disagree with. The only way to do that these days would be to be completely off grid somewhere and never to see anyone else.
It's also the case that political ads probably provide the worse kind of perspective of views you disagree with.
The solution to the problem is to find a way to get people to break out of their ego-based thinking. A lot of magical things can happen when people are honestly committed to finding the truth, instead of protecting what they think the truth is.
>Hearing something you might disagree with is part of life and very important to critical thinking
hearing one or two things you disagree with is part of life, hearing 100 things you disagree with a quarter of which are paid for by super PACs or in rubles isn't, that's a recipe for losing your mind.
'echo chamber' should become the unword of the year or something because apparently the free speech mantra has now turned into a license to shove opinions into other people's faces, a good portion of which aren't even authentic.
> Then it comes to the question is there is such thing as a true narrative to begin with as narratives
No there isn’t. There is truth and then there is people too lazy to do the investigation that uncovers the truth because it takes real work, real people, time and energy and unfortunately is not profitable.
Wait, you mean ban all ads completely and make Google lose 100 billion dollars of revenue and make advertisers waste more money on non-targeted ads increasing costs of products and make users pay subscription fees for currently ad funded services like Google Search? Otherwise I don't see how your statement makes any practical sense
Right. All ads are political by definition. So it’s really a ban on opposing ideology, and on overtly ideological ads which are really not so much of a problem. I think it’s a non-change from the current system, mostly a pr move.
Then there’s also the concept of truth that is factually incorrect. Like authors and comedians using made up/constructed anecdotes to convey a deep truth about society.
A great example is the lady scientist character from the Chernobyl series. She herself was a fabrication, but represented the factual voices of opinions of hundreds of USSR scientists. Because you can’t write a story with 200 main characters.
To be clear, you're in FAVOR of their policy that doesn't allow a rouge actor to, say, run ads targeted to a specific community that tell them Election Day is Wednesday, rather than Tuesday, right?
You're just opposed to the extra measure of removing ads that are based on their fact-checks of political issues? I favor removing on the basis of both, but I do think these are VERY different categories.
If they were an "[azure] actor who ran ads targeted to a specific community", should we suddenly be neutral? What difference does the color of the actor make?
> I don't want Google to be the judge of the validity of claims as it's perfectly possible to make an add which is 100% made up of technically correct statements but presents a misleading narrative.
What do you find objectionable about a low-pass filter that simply removes obvious lies?
The fact that I don't trust Google (or any other large corporation, for that matter) to judge what is and is not an "obvious lie" given the right political incentives. In this case, outright banning would be better and remove any ambiguity or opportunity for shenanigans.
If China says the majority of Hong Kong support immediate reunification, backed by a statement from the Hong Kong government, is that an "obvious lie"? It comes from what is considered to be an authoritative source of truth.
If Google can overrule a government's statement, by disagreeing with China, does that mean they can overrule the official statement of any government?
That gives them the power, and incentive, to approve some statements that come from the White House, and not others that might damage their own reputation.
Or rather, knowing Google, approval of these goes through a machine, with unknown bias, and suddenly Google is only approving right-wing messages. All Democrat messages get disapproved. Or vice versa.
It places Google in position as the ultimate source of truth, without giving them the responsibility that comes with that.
First you have to define what is an ad and what isnt. I a not being flippant, but with the web, anything published can be an advertisement and frankly, most content seen by people these days could be defined as a form of advertising...
Here here, this attitude that somehow the truth is impossible to know, and that there is no difference between insane conspiracy theories, and researched, documented facts is a pile of horse pucky.
Even this restriction costs them money, as the advertisers have either worse targeting, so lower ROI, so they'll spend less, or they'll have to do the targeting work themselves, which removes part of the value chain from Google, so they'll pay less.
I’m not sure if that: if ads are less effective (generalized, less targeted) advertisers (campaigns) will have to spend more money to have the same impact.
Let's be clear, this isn't an outright ban but just a restriction.
> It said political groups would soon only be able to target ads based on "general categories" such as age, gender and rough location.
This just means that the moneyed few with deep pockets and illicit agendas will simply have to spend more to get their message out since they won't have the benefit of niche targeting.
Nah its more complex than that. Micro targeting allows political groups to tailor their message to specific small demographics. They can tune their message slightly for each different group, drastically improving their targeting and voter appeal. When they have to target broad groups, they have to have a consistent message across all of those groups. This hurts their ability to manipulate and pander to sub populations.
I don't buy this argument (for some context, I work in digital politics and my agency buys digital political ads).
You can micro target political speech through non-digital channels such as mail, phones, doors, & addressable cable. Campaigns have been doing this for a LONG time - before the internet.
You can also still target very specific audiences even without 1:1 audience matching a la liveramp. E.g. retargeting, specific website placements, specific youtube video/channel placements, and more.
The one kind of large negative I can foresee with this restriction would be narrowing to likely voters, which is tougher without either an audience match or 3rd party data (though maybe still good enough with 'watches news' or 'visits msnbc.com' and similar). Though one can definitely argue a benefit here that speaking to only an audience of likely voters is a problem (and 'recycles' the same voters not brining new voters in), especially with Democrats who tend to only talk to those voters in VAN.
Well, it also means these tactics are less likely to go unnoticed. If some ads are actually a turnoff if seen by the wrong people then running them is riskier.
Oooo! So they make even more money since the advertisers can’t target the ads and have to use more but less effective ads!!! That’s a nice side effect for business while pretending you’re being noble. Ah, the joy of signaling.
By that logic Google, and everyone else, have been hurting themselves by offering targeting in the first place, and continue to do so by not restricting non-political advertising.
Its not about getting your message out, its about manipulating elections by military contractors, including last big two (brexit, Trump).
You can familiarize yourself with the issue by watching The Great Hack
(2019) on Netflix, or even a panel by Computer History Museum: "CHM Live | The Great Hack" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y26NQdTLtaw
I wish ad and social media companies would just tag ads (and ideally more popular articles) similar to how reddit mods can tag submissions. "Misleading", "Information cannot be verified", "Factually incorrect", "Paid for by XYZ", "Satire" etc. I would say they can probably do this with machine learning or some sort of crowdsourced system, but I feel like that is wide open to well poisoning attacks. Might be easiest and most accurate to send ads that get enough reports to a human to do tagging (or not if they don't think it is appropriate). Have several employees do tagging and if enough give the same tag, apply it. Warn all advertisers their articles can be tagged if they don't make an honest effort to accurately represent whatever it is they're advertising. It isn't perfect system, but I think it could work.
> Have several employees do tagging and if enough give the same tag, apply it.
When the scope of what you're tagging is expansive enough, inter-rater agreement isn't as useful as you'd think, primarily because you get correlated biases across your rater population.
These days the pendulum seems to have swung towards the left being fond of censorship and advocating for institutional control of "truth", so to use a left-coded example: good luck finding finding a population of raters in the US that doesn't fail the Implicit Association Test[1] wrt anti-black racism.
The "obvious" answer is to make sure your raters on each ad are balanced wrt biases, but doing so upon every axis that Google ads may refer to is literally impossible. You probably can't even articulate all the relevant axes.
It seems to be hard for people to imagine any ambiguity or flaws in the official truth that contemporary institutions push, so an easy thought exercise is to consider what this sort of an approach would have looked like during the Cold War, or even post-9/11. If you think those are anomalies and that we're in a post-lies, universal-truth era, I don't know what to tell you other than to suggest picking up a history book and realizing that there's never been such a thing.
[1] I'm aware of the flaws of this test and the associated studies, but what matters here is the perception of its usefulness.
Imagine the outcry if Google were to label an ad for Fox/Breitbart/Daily Caller/Trump as "misleading" or "factually incorrect". (Indeed I might get called out even here on HN for my "bias" given that I highlighted right-wing publications and politicians.)
No media outlet is immune to posting what may be considered factually incorrect information, for example, earlier this year as highlighted in [1].
Deciding what is "true" or not these days is incredibly difficult if not impossible when we have a POTUS who wants to control the narrative and calls what could be considered factually correct as "fake news".
Even reporting the "facts" has become incredibly difficult, especially when digital data is so easily manipulated (for example, how can we verify the integrity of a 'tweet' as it was published at a particular second in history? Is there a hash that should be provided? Screenshots can be easily manipulated, as some articles embed the tweet itself and can be later modified, even Spez on Reddit admitted to editing the database).
Change the terms, and give the audience a button to punish the advertiser. I would totally click a button that says "charge this advertiser an extra dollar for being misleading".
I do believe this will strengthen propaganda to be honest. I don't think I ever noticed a political ad from Google (not US based), but I am pretty certain that Google will ban those advertisements that are not in their interest. Google has close contaxts to many political circles.
I really don’t like Hillary and I refuse to use google.
I do enjoy reading DARPA funded research on occasion.
Smear starts here:
“ Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation.”
This is actually a systemic problem and seems more like a passive criticism of the US overall. The interesting tactic here is the Hillary+Obama+LiberalGoogle to get those divisive flames going.
Then it paints DARPA research as bad by trying to connect it directly to intelligence. WHAT defending your country is bad now?! Look at what you’re implicitly agreeing to if you accept this. Say NSA is bad or oversteps bounds or hacks to much or whatever those are separate arguments.
DARPA research is good stuff and supporting defense technology is too.
They are claiming the rules will be somehow similar:
> Whether you’re running for office or selling office furniture, we apply the same ads policies to everyone; there are no carve-outs. It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, we’re clarifying our ads policies and adding examples to show how our policies prohibit things like “deep fakes” (doctored and manipulated media), misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
This should be up to the FTC to enforce existing laws (in non-political advertising). Not a for-profit company. If the laws aren't adequate or enforcement isn't adequate I believe it's up to our Government to fix.
I can see this hitting legal businesses, like gun stores and abortion providers. Advertisements for those are equally political, but I really doubt that Google would judge it that way.
Google should create a department of truth, so everyone has a single source of objective truth. That should help put everyone at ease and make it easier to create a department of peace and love.
Readit News
However, the idea of removing ads because of 'false claims' can only lead to censorship in the future. The list of what's considered false will inevitably grow over time and put a lot of power in the hands of whoever is deciding the 'truthiness' of claims. It isn't difficult to imagine this being applied inconsistently in countries further away from Western politcal norms. This does give Google a lot of power in shaping political discourse and influence outside of US and EU territories.
We know from how they've handled disputes on YouTube, disabled Gmail and developer accounts that this process unlikely have any better transparency than we've seen to date.
I'd argue that political advertising would require greater transparency and I'm not convinced that Google has the capability or the motivation to provide it.
you might be right, but the reality is that the world has a large problem with disinformation and false claims right now that's causing real negative consequences for real people. Stopping the spread of false information is a good thing that should be done.
Letting blatant lies control our political processes now just to prevent future potential censorship in the future is not a good compromise.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)
Can you expand on what you mean by this? It seems we have more transparency than ever before into how governments are operating (mostly corruption) and that's a good thing. What negative consequences do you see coming from false claims?
I suspect the answer to this question might highlight why people are nervous about Google (or any company) being the arbiter of truth.
Then the question is does political advertising make the disinformation problem better or worse and I'm far less sure of that. It's easy to point to a few crazies but their influence is less certain and traditional media has always had plenty of crazy.
Difficulty: the claim needs to be one that was made in support of something that you personally agree with.
Looks like what they're calling 'false claims' is extremely narrow and based on simple objective facts:
> For example, Google would remove ads that falsely claimed that a candidate had died or that gave the wrong date for an election.
> However, it would not ban claims that you cannot trust a rival party, for instance, which would be viewed as being a matter of opinion.
IMO, I think the better approach to handle truthiness issues is to give the other party/candidate/candidates a chance to post a rebuttal.
I disagree. That's effectively how modern journalism works where the news is "objective" by letting each side say its piece.
The end result is that the media is easy exploitable. The fundamental problem is that manufacturing lies takes less effort than explaining the truth. The latter is hampered by requiring research, evidence, and consistency. The former has no such restrictions.
That means Party A can spend five minutes saying "Party B eats kittens!" Now Party A has to spend a week providing evidence that no, they do not in fact eat kittens. Meanwhile, Party A has already put out five more press releases about how Party B drinks the blood of infants, was responsible for Firefly being canceled, and wants to raise your taxes to buy bombs to drop on wildlife preserves.
The consequence is that whoever has the least respect for the truth has the greatest ability to control the narrative. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
This sort of thing needs to be black/white which is impossible leaving it full of grey areas where abuse and false positives without due process is a worse trade off than the original intention.
Then it comes to the question is there is such thing as a true narrative to begin with as narratives are subjective in nature, this is a can of worms that Google shouldn't open.
So yeah a full ban sure but not this, if they want some sort of a partial ban they should probably have an interface that allows local electoral commissions to vet advertisement and the most important thing I think Google must do is to disable targeted political ads if they continue to allow them in any shape or form.
Do you think that Google should allow an advertisement that falsely claims that a certain candidate has dropped out of the race, or that the election date has been changed?
Do you think that Google should allow an advertisement that falsely attributes words or actions to a certain candidate? (e.g. imagine an ad that falsely claims "Candidate X has changed her position on issue A.")
If you have different answers for some of these questions, then your view is more complicated than "I don't want Google to be the judge of the validity of claims."
There is a huge difference between an "ad" that is designed to compromise a bank account through phishing and a ad that is designed to sway political opinion even if it's untruthful.
In fact out of those 3 the former isn't even an advertisement necessarily despite the fact that it might be presented to the user through "google ads".
If you have a political message, it makes sense to force you to tailor that message on very broad terms. Hearing something you might disagree with is part of life and very important to critical thinking.
This is not intended to be an opinion on false statements in political advertising.
I'm not sure this is true. I know I don't see ads from all sides. In my experience the targeted ads just reinforce the echo chamber.
If we believe in the "market place of ideas" where validity and accuracy are the sole determiners of success then none should have artificial support. So all ads should be banned. If an idea fails in this market place, then it is reasonable to assume it is a bad idea. Leveraging it is just as bad when done by Soviet approved posters or Exxon paid for ads.
The echo chamber is an example where paid ads will actually _worsen_ the situation: Ads are aimed at target audiences driving them into more extremes by seeing exaggerated or false statement they would not have seen if there were no ads. Also, those echo chambers backed by moneyed interests will thrive and expand while those not money backed will fade. So instead of at least having some hope of uneasy balance between two extremes, you get head long plunge into just one of them.
I believe this is 100% true. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people do not have the skills to handle this. Look at the anger that appears on this site when certain topics are brought up.
So people have a hard time dealing with ideas they disagree with, but I doubt that forced interaction with those ideas will improve the situation.
We can see empirically that the most common reaction is to double down on your own ideas, get defensive, and generally react in a very self-centered and egotistical manner.
That's the current situation. Would banning political ads make this problem worse? I think I can see the logic here - people will only seek out what they agree with.
But it's not like political ads are the only way that they might be forced to see something they disagree with. The only way to do that these days would be to be completely off grid somewhere and never to see anyone else.
It's also the case that political ads probably provide the worse kind of perspective of views you disagree with.
The solution to the problem is to find a way to get people to break out of their ego-based thinking. A lot of magical things can happen when people are honestly committed to finding the truth, instead of protecting what they think the truth is.
hearing one or two things you disagree with is part of life, hearing 100 things you disagree with a quarter of which are paid for by super PACs or in rubles isn't, that's a recipe for losing your mind.
'echo chamber' should become the unword of the year or something because apparently the free speech mantra has now turned into a license to shove opinions into other people's faces, a good portion of which aren't even authentic.
No there isn’t. There is truth and then there is people too lazy to do the investigation that uncovers the truth because it takes real work, real people, time and energy and unfortunately is not profitable.
All the "righty" or "conservative" orgs i know about are mostly opinion pieces.
...uh, isn't that exactly the policy announced here?
>Google is extending a ban on political campaigns targeting advertising at people based on their supposed political leanings.
>It said political groups would soon only be able to target ads based on "general categories" such as age, gender and rough location.
Wait, you mean ban all ads completely and make Google lose 100 billion dollars of revenue and make advertisers waste more money on non-targeted ads increasing costs of products and make users pay subscription fees for currently ad funded services like Google Search? Otherwise I don't see how your statement makes any practical sense
A great example is the lady scientist character from the Chernobyl series. She herself was a fabrication, but represented the factual voices of opinions of hundreds of USSR scientists. Because you can’t write a story with 200 main characters.
You're just opposed to the extra measure of removing ads that are based on their fact-checks of political issues? I favor removing on the basis of both, but I do think these are VERY different categories.
What do you find objectionable about a low-pass filter that simply removes obvious lies?
If China says the majority of Hong Kong support immediate reunification, backed by a statement from the Hong Kong government, is that an "obvious lie"? It comes from what is considered to be an authoritative source of truth.
If Google can overrule a government's statement, by disagreeing with China, does that mean they can overrule the official statement of any government?
That gives them the power, and incentive, to approve some statements that come from the White House, and not others that might damage their own reputation.
Or rather, knowing Google, approval of these goes through a machine, with unknown bias, and suddenly Google is only approving right-wing messages. All Democrat messages get disapproved. Or vice versa.
It places Google in position as the ultimate source of truth, without giving them the responsibility that comes with that.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
> It said political groups would soon only be able to target ads based on "general categories" such as age, gender and rough location.
This just means that the moneyed few with deep pockets and illicit agendas will simply have to spend more to get their message out since they won't have the benefit of niche targeting.
You can micro target political speech through non-digital channels such as mail, phones, doors, & addressable cable. Campaigns have been doing this for a LONG time - before the internet.
You can also still target very specific audiences even without 1:1 audience matching a la liveramp. E.g. retargeting, specific website placements, specific youtube video/channel placements, and more.
The one kind of large negative I can foresee with this restriction would be narrowing to likely voters, which is tougher without either an audience match or 3rd party data (though maybe still good enough with 'watches news' or 'visits msnbc.com' and similar). Though one can definitely argue a benefit here that speaking to only an audience of likely voters is a problem (and 'recycles' the same voters not brining new voters in), especially with Democrats who tend to only talk to those voters in VAN.
Dead Comment
You can familiarize yourself with the issue by watching The Great Hack (2019) on Netflix, or even a panel by Computer History Museum: "CHM Live | The Great Hack" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y26NQdTLtaw
When the scope of what you're tagging is expansive enough, inter-rater agreement isn't as useful as you'd think, primarily because you get correlated biases across your rater population.
These days the pendulum seems to have swung towards the left being fond of censorship and advocating for institutional control of "truth", so to use a left-coded example: good luck finding finding a population of raters in the US that doesn't fail the Implicit Association Test[1] wrt anti-black racism.
The "obvious" answer is to make sure your raters on each ad are balanced wrt biases, but doing so upon every axis that Google ads may refer to is literally impossible. You probably can't even articulate all the relevant axes.
It seems to be hard for people to imagine any ambiguity or flaws in the official truth that contemporary institutions push, so an easy thought exercise is to consider what this sort of an approach would have looked like during the Cold War, or even post-9/11. If you think those are anomalies and that we're in a post-lies, universal-truth era, I don't know what to tell you other than to suggest picking up a history book and realizing that there's never been such a thing.
[1] I'm aware of the flaws of this test and the associated studies, but what matters here is the perception of its usefulness.
That is a dragon you don't want to tickle.
Deciding what is "true" or not these days is incredibly difficult if not impossible when we have a POTUS who wants to control the narrative and calls what could be considered factually correct as "fake news".
Even reporting the "facts" has become incredibly difficult, especially when digital data is so easily manipulated (for example, how can we verify the integrity of a 'tweet' as it was published at a particular second in history? Is there a hash that should be provided? Screenshots can be easily manipulated, as some articles embed the tweet itself and can be later modified, even Spez on Reddit admitted to editing the database).
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46935701
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
I do enjoy reading DARPA funded research on occasion.
Smear starts here:
“ Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation.”
This is actually a systemic problem and seems more like a passive criticism of the US overall. The interesting tactic here is the Hillary+Obama+LiberalGoogle to get those divisive flames going.
Then it paints DARPA research as bad by trying to connect it directly to intelligence. WHAT defending your country is bad now?! Look at what you’re implicitly agreeing to if you accept this. Say NSA is bad or oversteps bounds or hacks to much or whatever those are separate arguments.
DARPA research is good stuff and supporting defense technology is too.
Oh great, this means they will apply the same rules to regular ads, right?
>Oh great, this means they will apply the same rules to regular ads, right?
So ban all ads altogether :)
> Whether you’re running for office or selling office furniture, we apply the same ads policies to everyone; there are no carve-outs. It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, we’re clarifying our ads policies and adding examples to show how our policies prohibit things like “deep fakes” (doctored and manipulated media), misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
https://blog.google/technology/ads/update-our-political-ads-...