Political adverts isn't the main problem. The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.The blame game is huge as well and shouldn't be allowed at all. Until all this is fixed, there's not much hope for any ON/OFF settings on social media.
It's a complex issue but having some sort of mechanism where you can't just say:'Poland will attack the US next year,we need to prepare for it!!' and then move on as nothing happened, would help. In the the same way as CEOs can't just walk around talking whatever shit they want to just because they've got fiduciary responsibility,some good practices could be applied to candidates.
This case is about public officials suing the press.
In my humble opinion, it should be perfectly possible for citizens to sue their politicians for being lied to. Eventually they are supposed to act in our interest and without real information, the democratic process is undermined.
Civilians should be able to trust the elected leaders' words.
> This case is about public officials suing the press.
In this case, Facebook is "the press". Keep in mind that there is no legal definition of what it means to be "the press" — rightfully so. NYT v Sullivan is particularly relevant because, in the case, NYT carried out a full page ad by supporters of MLK Jr containing several factual inaccuracies, such as the number of times King had been arrested during the protests, what song the protesters had sung, and whether or not students had been expelled for participating. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that, unless you can prove "actual malice", the free dissemination of information is protected by the Constitution.
Those that post on FB are already held liable. The whole point is that Facebook Inc isn't liable. If you were to post the text of the first chapter of Harry Potter in a FB post, Facebook Inc would not be liable for copyright violation, it would be the individual (or association) that posted it.
> In my humble opinion, it should be perfectly possible for citizens to sue their politicians for being lied to.
It already is possible to do this, it's just practically infeasible. If you are able to prove "actual malice" — I.e. if you can prove that a politician knowingly lied to their constituents, they can already be held liable for damages. The burden to prove this is high enough that you would need to find documented evidence that the individual in question knew the truth and specifically lied. Remember, it is not illegal to make political promises that you can't keep, and it is not illegal to be publicly wrong about the facts.
> Civilians should be able to trust the elected leaders' words.
No disagreements there. The only issue is that the First Amendment makes it essentially impossible regulate how those words are disseminated.
It is technically, politically possible, at least in the legislative branch; Congress is constitutionally afforded the right to censure and expel a member -- which presumably these ads are promoting.
Ideally, the voters can vote these people out. Politicians are not hatching from eggs, they come from people and reflect them. Same people who watch blatantly biased news, later are influenced by false ads. Improve education.
I do agree that politicians are the reflection of voters. I also agree that education needs to be improved, however I'm not sure how: modern education leaves almost no space for critical thinking,which is essential when dealing with false information. There's also a huge element of ideology,which rarely,if ever,can be changed. Lastly, if done right, masses can be convinced just about anything...
This wouldn't completely fix the problem, but I think it would help to not allow candidates to make factually false statements.
That is to say: there may not be a way to objectively say whether a given statement is true, but it is possible to objectively say that some statements are false.
NYT v Sullivan was a landmark Supreme Court case which held that the Constitution protects the publishing of political advertisements that contain factual inaccuracies.
Who verifies what is true or not? Much of the media has a bias either way. Who is the arbiter of absolute truth? Who decides when a theory is mature enough to be absolute fact?
So, before social media, this wasn't regulated by law, but it was to a large extent regulated by the media. Politicians didn't have a good way to lie directly to the public; their main avenue for lying to the public was via the media, which would tend to fact check them.
There's a big difference between "candidate X says that pigs can fly and this is why that's wrong", and "The flying pigs above your house are bigly bad", as far as public messaging goes. Social media has enabled the latter, and it's kind of an unsolved problem. Social media has also caused a major blurring between advertisement and content, which doesn't help.
EDIT: An interesting/worrying byproduct of this seems to be that parts of the media are going further and further off-piste, and letting complete _nonsense_ go by without the "and here's why that's wrong" bit. A glaring recent example was parts of the US right-wing media absolutely tying itself in knots to explain why Trump's rambling about disinfectants for treatment of COVID in humans made sense. It's just really hard to imagine this happening 20 years ago.
I think you’re really overestimating the integrity of historic media. The sober tendency of media to “fact check” has only been the case in the last few decades.
The history of the printing press was fraught with exactly the kinds of concerns people appear to have with social media. In those days, you had politicians routinely troll political opponents, publish partisan screeds under pseudonyms, and openly advertise their own biases.
They were never regulated by law because the Constitution makes such regulation essentially impossible.
Well, yeah, I'm thinking mostly of mid to late 20th century media.
To be clear, I don't really see a problem with media being partisan as such. It always has been to some extent. The direct line from politicians to public is new, though (at least on this scale; there are prior examples of politicians using radio in this way, but it was somewhat more restrained).
> The key issue is that the candidates can say virtually anything they want irrespectively whether it's true or not.
A lot of the people who appear to believe a given politician's untruths don't actually believe them, but go along because they feel the untruths are a small "price" to pay for the larger goals they share with the politician. The liar is on their "side", after all.
This phenomenon - publicly believing or denying, and privately disbelieving - gets more extreme the greater the untruth. Basically, as long as they are in on the political lie, they don't mind being lied to.
