Taking a page out of the old facebook
What U.S. presidential candidate spent the most money on facebook ads last year?
How accurate was your prediction?
How surprising is this data?
What story does the chart tell?
Why is the story this way?
What is one consequence of the story the chart tells?
Is this good news?
If you could be the Teen-campaign manager of any presidential campaign, which campaign would you want to manage?
What would you advise them regarding social media/facebook spending?
How different would this chart look if instead of facebook spending, it measured the total amount of money spent on the campaign?
How different would this chart would be if it measured the likelihood of winning the 2020 election?
Elizabeth Warren recently requested that facebook remove a “fake video” that had been posted about her. Facebook refused to remove the ad and stood by its controversial stance of not touching political ads, even if they contain lies. What do you think facebook should do about ads that are false?
Imagine that facebook decided to ban the “fake video” of Elizabeth Warren. What does the First Amendment say about freedom of speech?
In what way is the First Amendment irrelevant to facebook’s decision of what to allow to be posted?
According to the Wall Street Journal, political ad Spending will approach $10 Billion in 2020. Is that good news?
Explain How all that money will impact the election results.
A media strategy has been deployed by authoritarian political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to jam the signals, sowing confusion about what it real or false with blasts of disinformation. Autocrats no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise. What impact do you think censorship through noise will play in the 2020 election?
Some tech platforms like twitter have sought to mitigate election interference and misinformation through an outright ban on political ads. is twitter’s ban good for democracy?
Imagine you were the head of a major social media platform (Swag!) explain what your political ads policy would be:
How much are voters actually swayed by what they see on social media?
What do you think the Framers would have thought about social media and presidential campaigns?
Learning Extension
Read the Vox Recode story on the biggest stories in tech in 2019.
Action Extension
Contact facebook and let them know what you think about their political ad policy.
Visual Extension
