"We've gone from
> They actively want their users to be free to consume what they want, even if others think that’s bad for them.

To "They're legally allowed to remove whatever posts they want, and they don't need to be consistent about it"."

Your framing here suggests that you think that I've shifted my stance in some way, but that's not the case at all.

I, as a consumer of Facebook, enjoy the platform because I can (foremost) communicate with my friends/family, and also because the ads I see are relevant to my interests. I, as an independent swing voter, also enjoy being able to see political ads from everyone, directly from the horse's mouth. The fact that one is able to choose whether or not they want to consume political ads if they've already made up my mind, is great. Everyone gets what they want there.

While you're correct that ads can be misleading or wrong, and that an impressionable voter can see an ad that you may not want them to see, that is a consequence of living in a free society where information can be freely disseminated. I can persuade someone of the most incorrect or immoral point of view, and there's not much you can do to prevent me from doing that except to try and make your own case to persuade them back.

Freedom of speech (as a principle, not as a law) isn't just the freedom for the the speaker to disseminate their ideas, it's also the freedom of the audience to hear it. If you don't want to consume some speech, that's fine (and your prerogative), but that doesn't mean that you get to decide what I see. As for pornography, there are a ton of places one can go to consume unfettered pornography. There are not very many places one can participate in a virtual public square with a cacophony of ideas and views — it's really just Facebook or Twitter. In my subjective view I have less of a problem with Facebook disallowing pornography than I would of them disallowing political speech (paid or otherwise).

The fact that Facebook appears to be running their platform with this principle is in no way inconsistent with the statement "They actively want their users to be free to consume what they want, even if others think that’s bad for them."

> In other words, their stance is currently "We'll only censor the unimportant things that the small guys post."

The links to Facebook's ToS that you provided appear to only disallow ads that could already be held liable for legal damage. And keep in mind that false advertising and defamation, in American law, is only regulated through material damages, not as a function of the speech itself. If a company posted an ad for a toaster that doesn't actually work, and nobody purchases the toaster, they can't be indemnified. It is only after someone buys a dud toaster, that they can sue the company for damages. All that being said, the unanimous NYT v Sullivan decision held that it is not illegal to make political promises that you can't keep, and it is not illegal to be publicly wrong about the facts. You cannot sue George HW Bush for raising your taxes after campaigning on "Read My Lips, No New Taxes" — it just doesn't work that way.

Insofar as FB also polices what a private individual has to say about something, I think we can find common ground and agree that this is bad, and antithetical to Facebook's purported stance on free information.