You can look up right now what labels Facebook has assigned you for targeting advertising (link at the bottom).
The Facebook algorithm decides which of the posts made by your friends/groups/liked pages you will see based on relevance.
Now this algorithm may very likely use your ad preferences as it’s parameters. Each post will get analyzed and labeled according to its themed. The posts which have labels that match your preferences would get given higher priority.
This is effectively turning the volume up on posts that match your advertising preferences. And turning the volume up on certain things can be very powerful.
So for example turning the volume up on organic discussions about your products would literally be the best advertising you could buy, word of mouth.
But what’s even more powerful than turning the volume up on some labels is turning the volume down on some of them.
They could charge a lot of money to turn down the volume of certain types posts. Suppression of speech as a commodity.
Now how would this relate to politics where advertising budgets are quite larger? And politicians with more money would be able to spend more on silencing criticisms of them or positive appraisals of their opponents.
Now tell me if you think Mark Zuckerburg has not thought of this first. Really?
Now I don’t know if it’s been used by any politicians yet or even if it’s been advertised by Facebook yet. But I would not be surprised if all this is already happening.
http://facebook.com/ads/preferences
YouTube is not safe, they turn off monetization AT-WILL effectively censoring topics (based on tags):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbph5or0NuM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUkj4h_Tq-0)
PS. Aren’t FB and Google both on board with the TPP?