“But we’re the internet. We don’t have to obey regular laws.”
Slightly OT. If you are a Facebook user and hate their ads and sponsored posts and other crap, Firefox + Adblock + F.B. Purity will chop out all of that crap. During the last couple of years I’ve never seen a ad or a “sponsored” story. It really works. It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping! It’s both! I wasn’t propagandized over the last few years.
So…FUCK YOU PUTIN!
That actually felt good.
Sorry, just flashed back to the old Lily Tomlin telephone operator skits of ages ago. “We are the telephone company. We are not subject to local, state, or federal regulation. We are omnipotent.”
"A Twitter spokesperson said that the company looked “forward to engaging with Congress and the FEC on these issues.”
No, they don’t.
if all this stuff makes you feel good, that’s fine. but it’s not really addressing the underlying, more salient issues.
Facebook said … that it looked “forward to continuing the conversation with lawmakers as we work toward a legislative solution.”
How about a little integrity from FaceBook itself, rather than relying on only legislative solutions? That said, this is progress on something that should have been done the week after the election. I almost want this to fly through Congress with just under enough votes for a veto to see what Trump does but I’d prefer it pass without a single nay vote.
Agreed, this just provides access to who is manipulating these social media platforms, which is something that is mostly already known, but it’s a start…what they need to do next is to allow individual users to block these advertisers from their feeds, preferrably by default opt-out so the user has to opt-in to these specific ones. This is going to be a decades long fight to solve this problem, the tech side is just the start and the easiest to solve.
This is a timely bit of legislation, but it doesn’t go far enough.
But it is unlikely to get a vote, because the GOP doesn’t want to crimp Putin’s style just before the mid-terms.