What election?
These guys are running for competitions to be nominated for their private clubs. They ain't public elections.
In its effort to prevent election meddling in America, Facebook has ended up meddling in an election in America. On Thursday, the social ad giant changed its rules for distributing political and issue ads through its platform, to increase transparency and accountability, the company said. For two Republicans challenging …
Rubbish. They are public elections in every meaningful sense: they are operated by Mississippi government agencies under Mississippi state law; and they are an integral component in the process by which US senators and representatives from Mississippi are elected to office. Probably only the winner of the primary can appear on the ballot (I am not a Mississippi citizen and state laws vary on this).
Being a mossback in some respects, I oppose the notion of primary elections as they are run in the US (especially in California, where they can exclude major party candidates from the ballot entirely, and have done). However, they are what they are, and this claim that they are not is false.
They are public elections in every meaningful sense
That does not mean that they are not competitions to be elected in their private club. Just their private club is tightly integrated into the state and (ab)uses state resources. Everyone salute the hammer and sickle on the star spangled banner of USsr.
They are public elections in every meaningful sense
And, in a state dominated by one party, the Primary Election is the ONLY election that matters.
If companies *must* change political ad policies in the middle of a heated election season, it is incumbent upon them to make exceptions in cases such as these. Especially when they've happily taken the candidates' money until now, which surely proves their identity.
"Just their private club is tightly integrated into the state and (ab)uses state resources."
It's another example of the systemic corruption in the US system, where the incumbent parties are woven into the government structure - to the point that they're basically different aspects of the same thing (the money party).
As for "do this when there's not an election" - fat chance of that, there's always an election on somewhere and it's not Facebook's problem that this guy's ID doesn't match his campaigning name (plus the point that FB warned ahead of time that they were implementing this policy, so the campaign had time to sort it out in advance of the drop-dead date and didn't bother)
I only have a Facebook account for immediate family, and only log into it once every couple of months. In the last 2 years alone, Facebook has suspended my account four times claiming I'm not real. Every time I get it reactivated by submitting a scan of my driver's license. They reinstate my account, and then some number of months later (typically 5-6) they resuspend it until I submit the (same) scan of the (same) driver's license. They have been doing this for years. Pretty clear programming skills & algorithm development isn't the strong suit of anyone at Facebook.
I have an old facebook account I set up with a bogus name, it doesn't even sound real. I set it up soon after facebook went live and it's never been challenged, but then I never post anything and that account has no friends. I only use it for things like "log in with facebook" for web sites I don't care about.
Heck, there are always elections going on someplace in the United States. States control most election rules and timing, and there are fifty of them. I live in New York, and really wish they could do something like consolidate all the primaries down to one day, with one ballot, in one location, with one general election event to follow. And ditch special elections.
I wonder if, by establishing these restrictions, Facebook has become a publisher, something they almost certainly do not want to be, and have, if I remember right, stated that they are not. I wonder, too, if that opens the door, if only a small crack, to liability for false and defamatory statements - libel - that their users post.
I sense opportunity for the lawyer class here, where contingent fees are common.
I've never understood how Facebook is anything but a publisher.
Publishing is the process of taking "content" generated by whoever, and distributing it to as many as possible of those people who are sufficiently interested in it. That's precisely what Facebook does, it's the ONLY thing it does.
Publishers choose what content to distribute (they reject a lot) and guide its creation and editing, generally speaking. Intermediaries simply distribute content as-is, and essentially aren't responsible for illegal or infringing content.
Facebook and Google claim to be intermediaries while behaving increasingly like publishers. If they're suppressing legitimate content based on opaque internal policies, I'd say they've crossed the line.
... the interfering interconnections between Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, Tony Blair and "Philip Cross"
A lot of Wikipaedia has been abused by agenda driven people for a long time, it's no surprise that political/corporate groups are usurping it to their own ends.
You only have to look at Wiki's never ending desire for contributions and lack of clarity to see it is ripe for abuse.
You're reading it wrongly.
Given the NPOV rules, it is surely obvious that any attempt to tackle a political topic will result in an edit war and a pointless hair-splitting article that no sane person would ever want to read (or, for that matter, be involved in writing).
Therefore, on a political topic, you ignore the main article and skim the associated "Talk" page to glean the main points of contention. Having familiarised yourself with the idiots at either extreme, you choose a comfortable position somewhere in between.
...and the other Silicon Valley moguls in charge of those major multinational conglomerates, have made their self-serving activist political agendas public knowledge in petitions they have signed in the past, their other public statements, and their public actions - e. g., sponsoring and designing the meetings of world globalists at Davos, etc. As oligopolists at best, and monopolists at worse, in the web's search-, video- and social-media-spaces, they are not, by any stretch of imagination, neutral arbiters of politically sensitive content in their respective spaces. That, together with the U.S. MSM TV universe, that is also owned in its entirety by merely six other globalist multinational media-entertainment conglomerates - who also own and control more than half of Hollywood - give them almost complete control over what the vast majority of Americans see and hear regarding the "news" and the "views" on such. It has gone to such extremes that the options for resolution are few and all are brutal to one faction or another, but letting it roll on is worse.
I wasn't suggesting a "conspiracy", the opposite. A common agenda is all they need - e. g., open borders, mass amnesty, unlimited H-1b visas, free trade with all regardless of anything, etc. and they are already on record for those. When that common agenda aligns against Trump and others who want to put national interests above those of other nations (as all other nations do) and the interests of the multinationals', they they can and are indeed bent on controlling what Americans (and others in the world) think.
Much as I hate FB, their backhanded changing of their T&Cs whenever they feel like it, and their microprofiling of everyone and their dog, they're doing something right here. But not as right as it, IMNSHO, should be: the correct[0] thing to do when such a decision is taken is to apply the new policy to the political campaigns starting after that date. That would still hit the campaigns being fully lined up to use social media as their (main) advertising channel, but not having started yet. A cut-off date a month ahead may even be better, allowing campaign teams to adjust their strategy.
[0] I wrote 'ethical' at first, but that's a concept totally foreign to both FB and US politics.
"Much as I hate FB, their backhanded changing of their T&Cs whenever they feel like it,"
Yes, they've had two years to work up to complying with GDPR and appear at first glance to have failed miserably (accept the new terms or close your account), yet they expect users to accept their changes at short notice every time. I guess they don't like the idea that people should have at least equal rights in a contract with a corporation.