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Facebook to let users turn off political adverts:
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election.
In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters.
Facebook has faced heavy criticism for allowing adverts from politicians that contain false information.
Rival social platform Twitter banned political advertising last October.
"For those of you who've already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you -- so we're also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads," Mr Zuckerberg wrote.
Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram will give users the option to turn off political adverts when they appear or they can block them using the settings features.
Users that have blocked political adverts will also be able to report them if they continue to appear.
The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organisations that have the "Paid for" political disclaimer.
The company said it plans to make the feature available to all US users over the next few weeks and will offer it in other countries this autumn.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @08:47AM
By the rest of the world, you mean a handful of countries in Europe which amount to less than 10% of the world's population, right? And if we're being precise about the countries you consider to be "the rest of the world" it'd be more like less than 5% of the world.
And even within those negligibly small countries, it depends on the issues you're talking about. For instance Norway, and it's 5 million citizens, are one of those countries you're referencing. Did you know there that, on public, television they ran a series called Hjernevask [wikipedia.org]. It was about gender studies and related programs. Very progressive as you'd no doubt expect. Except Hjernevask means 'to brainwash' and the series was not only incredibly critical of the entire field, but was met with a universally positive reception that ultimately led to the cessation of funding for such programs in Norway. It's an awesome series by the way. It has links to the videos on the Wiki page.
However, such a thing would be framed as misogynistic or even Nazi propaganda or whatever sort of nonsense in America. Even corporate America has jumped on this bandwagon. YouTube has now, somewhat recently, decided to label the videos as containing "inappropriate content" requiring a login to view. No idea when that happened but it's new. Ultimately many democratic social views would not only be considered ultra far left in the "rest of the world", even that negligibly small chunk you're talking about when you say such things, but they would be considered dangerously extremist.