HN commenters come from all over the world and have various backgrounds and viewpoints. Do you find that commenters always echo your viewpoints? Likely not, which should be proof right there that there are at least two camps. Trying to categorize such a large and varied group of people into a small number groups is likely going to be problematic, as is trying to simplify the positions of the commenters you read.

Here, so far, nobody seems to be siding with Booking.com. Small sample size perhaps. Unlikely to be herd-mentality.

It's pretty much just that, particularly when it comes to political advertising. Regulatory bodies operate with the full oversight of government and the courts; if they make poor decisions, they can be held accountable. Facebook are already frighteningly powerful and deputising them to be arbiters of truth only makes them more powerful.

Facebook should absolutely have mechanisms in place to facilitate swift and effective intervention by regulatory agencies, but they shouldn't be acting as a regulatory agency themselves.

1) In the former case, the question is: "Who decides what ads can and cannot be shown?"

Is it Facebook? No, people don't trust Facebook to have any clue about neutrality. Is it government? Of course not. Is it "an independent agency"? How do you determine 'independent'?

There is no appropriate regulator for what is and is not a fair ad. It's easy to block ads that contain hate speech. It's harder to regulate many types of "misleading".

2) Ads are a form of free speech and outreach to people. You can view advertisements as not even being connected to the service offering the placement. From Facebook/Google ads to billboards and TV, the point is to communicate a message. It isn't really for the host to decide what messages one can show to a very large audience, or to decide on censorship (goes back to point 1), beyond the obvious denial of ads with hate speech, inciting violence, etc.

The point is not the free speech of the advertisement provider. It's the free speech of the advertisers, and their freedom to get their message to people (irrelevant of popularity of the message).

3) The tactics used by Booking.com is fundamentally different. It's a company using deceptive practices to increase its own sales. There are no two parties here, nor is it an open market. It's the same company lying in its product to encourage conversions by deception. There is no advantage to free speech by allowing this to happen.

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I do not support complete market freedom, although I support the two things you mentioned, and I think it may be true for many (most?) people. Companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves in many sectors. Governments must always involve themselves to ensure fairness, real competitive behaviour and the protection of rights.

Furthermore, most people are incapable of dealing with things like deceptive practices themselves. And that's where governments have to step in. Unfortunately, although it would be an ideal world where people can make their own choices and everything is a free market, most people aren't able to live in such a world and would be exploited dry.

As far as political ads go, if something is a 'strategic lie'^, it's down to other campaigns to expose it as a lie. This comes down to point (1) of what I mentioned in my previous response; if we want to ban campaigns from spreading 'lies' there has to be a regulatory to decide what speech is and is not allowed on the basis of truth.

One possible solution is to have an incredibly independent branch of Congress do it, and any decision to reject an ad should be in public record with reasoning. But if this decision to reject was 'incorrect', exposure to the political content has been lost (the record of this branch won't nearly be as popular in access). There's too much subjectivity in the process by nature.

^: It's easier to censor blatant lies vs strategic lies. e.g. if you pull a figure out of thin air it's easier for any regulator to get away with saying it's a blatant lie and dishonest (eg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49701027). But many political ads are not such 'blatant lies', they're 'strategic lies'. They bend a fact (eg Vote Leave's bending of UK financial contributions to EU), or have a 'strategic' interpretation of something (deliberate misinterpretation to your advantage of a possibly vague statement of another politician), and they're usually worded 'strategically' to stay in a gray area. To regulate stuff like this is incredibly controversial because you're in a gray area of free speech.

The idea is that any person should be able to say anything and get their idea across to people, then it's up for people to determine whether they agree, disagree, or if they find it true or false.

If politics worked perfectly this would work without regulation. Other parties would expose it as a lie (or better yet, people do their research themselves) and people should care that a party is lying and hence it would count against the lying party. But since politics today sucks and people would stick with party through lies and deceit it doesn't seem to be working as well in practice.

Very many agree that Facebook cannot be trusted. They would ruin a good number of peoples lives a day given that 1) they could get away with it 2) they would earn more money that way.

Around here (Europe) however we already have kind-of-working regulations for ads and it would be nice to adapt those to work for booking.com as well.

Edit: removed "happily" in "happily ruin a good number of peoples lives" as I guess they'd rather prefer not to if it didn't cost them money ;-)