181–190 of 362 posts
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Doesn't clicking on ads reward google, instead of punishing them?
The budget from advertisers is already credited to Google - if such tactic becomes popular, advertisers would get lower returns (bounces would be way higher than now), and move their budgets elsewhere, harming Google's business.
Consider the story about Russia hacking the 2016 elections through the use of a massive campaign of personalized ads on Facebook and Google to polarize communities through misinformation sites tailored to their personal biases.
Whether you believe the Russia story or not, this set of actions would as surely constitute an attack on a civilian population as a deployment of a bioweapon tailored to cause mental confusion and delirium.
Yet due to a blind spot and the daily delivery of these weapons on behalf of the major personalized ad aggregators, we do not recognize the severity of what's going on. Long-term elevated levels of stress hormones do real physical damage.
Can you imagine if the survivors of Nagasaki were to react to the nuclear destruction of their city with the same careless indifference that we have towards the continuous attempts to reprogram our very minds?
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Whether or not it's accurate matters a lot less than whether or not it's kind .
Kind doesn't really make for healthy discussions when your definition of kind includes leaving out pertinent information and points of view.
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No, I felt the same way. The platforms are just doing what they are programmed to do, its not meant to be offensive. The fact that it is offensive is not something a computer could detect, exactly, so in my mind the platforms have done nothing wrong.
No, with power comes responsibility. If I make an automated car that runs over pedestrians but otherwise runs great. I can’t ethically write it off as “well, it’s just doing what it was programmed to do. There aren’t many pedestrians compared to cars anyways.” These ad companies that presume too much deserve the backlash when they get it wrong. They are responsible for their creations actions good and bad.
Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…
> You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative.
Considering only the profit aspect (because the ethics, social responsibility, and public opinion aspects have already been addressed elsewhere in this thread and on twitter):
Surely it's a better ROI to have a user than to lose a user. Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave.
Surely it's a better ROI to show relevant ads than offending ads. Hence, it makes more sense to show e-counseling ads to grieving eyes than to show them tragedy-reminder ads.
Honestly, this seems like a no-brainer from any perspective.
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No, I felt the same way. The platforms are just doing what they are programmed to do, its not meant to be offensive. The fact that it is offensive is not something a computer could detect, exactly, so in my mind the platforms have done nothing wrong.
But at the end of the day, humans are still in charge, not algorithms. If they can't adequately control the algorithms, perhaps they're not ready to be deployed. To see this a little more clearly, if a military deployed autonomous killer robots that kept accidentally killing civilian children, would you then argue the military isn't responsible?
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I don't disagree with this, but this argument fails to acknowledge the responsibility of social media companies to communicate what information they gather about you and how they choose to use it. On both fronts, they're still entirely too opaque. It might not be a fair comparison, but I feel like this argument is the equivalent to smoking for 40 years without realizing that it causes cancer because the hypothetical…
Social media companies are incredibly clear about what information they gather and how they will use it: everything and however they want. Is anyone actually unaware of this? The individuals may not consider the consequences, but twitter has no responsibility to tell you that they'll use your pregnancy post to advertise to you, and what the ramifications of that might be. Advertising algorithms are amoral tools put i…
> Advertising algorithms are amoral tools put into this world by amoral entities.
Are you saying that social media companies aren't subject to moral and ethical scrutiny? I'm really confused by this statement.
I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement peo…
> To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement people have when they demand FB/Twitter/etc fix their individual problems. Individual problems caused by the platform. If something or someone is causing a problem for me one method to rectify it is to simply ask them to help. It's a pretty standard thing in society. > What I don't understand is why they think they have a right to demand that a platform…
I'd go further, as someone who makes products used by people I'd be thrilled if a user shared their experience with my product in such a fashion! Even if the experience is bad, at least I'd know about and have the chance to fix it. Worst case is people having bad experiences with my product and me being clueless.
I understand that in this case this particular issue is probably known and ignored, but still, inferring "entitlement" from people who share feedback seems like a step in the wrong direction.
Amazon tells me I've had an account with them for over a decade. It knows I've bought 2 kettles from them. When does it start serving ads for kettles? Just after I've bought one.
On the other hand I'm not sure most people would want facebook wt al 'knowing' they've just lost their child, so other than getting rid of targetted ads, I'm not sure what other solution is best.