This meme has been doing the rounds on Facebook:
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There’s been quite a discussion:
Boyan Slat vs. Greta Thunberg | reddit
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And, yes, there are other activists:
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And perhaps Facebook is not the best place to have a reasonable debate…
Warren runs a false Facebook ad to protest false Facebook ads
Daily Crunch: Facebook has a weak stance on political ads
Facebook May Have Been Used To ‘Brainwash’ Children Into …
Facebook’s refusal to fact-check Trump could be its defining …
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Finally:
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If Facebook just wants to allow politicians to spout mistruths and conspiracy theories without fact checks on its platforms as status updates from their personal pages, then some of these claims could be taken more seriously, but Facebook is getting paid to push these messages to its users. It’s algorithmically deciding where these messages go based on parameters set by the campaigns via a system it designed.
Before you sound off, yeah, political advertising isn’t anything new. I am well aware that TV channels and newspapers have carried messy attack ads and hauled in the advertising revenues for decades, but Facebook is a platform designed around scale. Scale has allowed the company to tap massive revenue streams, but it’s also opened up the company to critiques. The company has learned to respect this scale after sizable amounts of external pressure were applied, but they’ve always defaulted to dated comparisons when it’s profitable to them.