Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
fossuser · 2020-05-27
· Original
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If you're genuinely asking, Palmer Luckey gave $10k to a group that put up an anti-Hillary billboard in 2016 (with a cartoon caricature) [0]. This group was also publishing stupid pro-trump political memes.
He was subsequently found out and forced by Zuckerberg to publish a letter pretending he supported Gary Johnson (a lie that Zuckerberg thought was more palatable than Luckey's Trump support). He ended up being sort of fired later because nobody wanted him on their team anymore.
The best information I've read about this is in Steven Levy's new book Facebook: The Inside Story [1].
[0]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-nea...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Inside-Story-Steven-Levy/dp/...
In Steven Levy's book [0] he goes into detail about this, the Trump campaign would show ads that specifically appeal to certain users while avoiding showing them ads that would turn them off.
If you were in a targeted group known to be anti-immigrant then you'd get the anti-immigrant ad, if you were in a group that was pro-immigrant you might get the tax-cut ad, if you were someone that would never vote for Trump then you'd get anti-hillary ads, etc.
This isn't at all neutral. FB's newsfeed also being algorithmically ordered for engagement (or really any way that's not chronological) is also not neutral. I'm partial to the argument that FB can't be arbiters of what's true and what's not, that people should hear the political speech as long as it's truly coming from those politicians - but this breaks down when FB allows people to narrowly target the message while also manipulating the general feed.
People are only hearing subsets of political speech precisely targeted to manipulate them. It's not informative, it's leveraging confirmation bias and hiding contradictory information.
I generally agree with the point that they're better being neutral, but then they should be neutral and not algorithmically rank for individual user engagement or allow this kind of targeting on political ads. Otherwise they're making editorial decisions as a publisher and should be held to that higher standard.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Inside-Story-Steven-Levy/dp/...