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Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

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Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#241
post #74
post #41

We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook! But oh not all speech just some speech that we don’t like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don’t like. And we reserve the right to change at any time. So, please just censor speech that we don’t like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we’ll tell you what to censor next.

Speech that leads to violence, how about starting with that?

“No taxation without representation.”

Sorry, I know that’s pretty extreme.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched for Verizon on Google, and there was a Verizon ad, so they're still spending on digital marketing elsewhere. That Google ad is not even likely to be profitable considering Verizon owns all the organic links in the first page of results except for the Wikipedia result ranked fourth. If they were cutting advertising spend due to the economy, it would be rational to cut unprofitable spend first. I'm incl…

The rate Google charges for ads is inversely proportional to click-through rate, so you pay less per click if your click-through rate is higher. In the case of a company bidding to advertise on searches for that company’s own name, it means that the company can win the bid with a lower offer than competitors trying to put ads there. You could say Google is extorting Verizon to pay up to prevent competitors from steal…

That they pay little doesn't matter. What matters is that it's above zero, which is what the clicks would cost without the ad, making them unprofitable.

The competitor argument for running the ad has two problems. The first is that no competitors are bidding for that keyword, and the second is that a competitor would already have to pay a lot to get top of page placement for a keyword they can't put in their ad copy.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#243

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

What, exactly, is your alternative here? The government forces me to fund speech I hate? Facebook is not allowed to ban literal NAZIs? A mandated minimum ad spend for all TV programs?

I can’t understand the supposed end-game for this idea that no one is allowed to moderate speech on private property.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#244

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

Not quite as ironic as a President complaining about his right to free speech in a private forum (not a violation of the 1st amendment) even as he is threatening threatening to use the military to suppress peaceful protests (an actual violation of the 1st amendment).

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#245
post #133
post #34

I am very nervous that the main US political outcomes of 2020 will be a reduction in free speech and expansion of executive powers.

In other news, the US has been downgraded to “flawed democracy” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

By The Economist, so it means nothing.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling lemonade, running a bike shop, etc.

There are permits required to run a lemonade stand and a bike shop. Who do you think sets the rules for those permits?

Again though that's an example of being affected by politics, not participating in it.

Sales at the lemonade stand are affected by weather, but that doesn't mean that the owner should immediately start building a climate-changing machine.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#247

The outrage in this thread doesn't make sense to me. This is how advertising works, it's a business decision based on business interests, Verizon doesn't care about any of this one way or another, they are simply taking a stance based on pressure from their customers. What so many of you flippantly dismiss as an outrage mob is a coalition of concerned citizens who believe Facebook is wrong for allowing dishonest poli…

I don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left).

I lean quite heavily left, I'm Australian and my political compass aligns me the most with our Greens party. I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards. Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform [1]. I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media. I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.

I hope people turn out and vote in the coming US elections because I suspect the Trump voters are going to come in huge numbers. The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016. ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.

[1] - https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate Google charges for ads is inversely proportional to click-through rate, so you pay less per click if your click-through rate is higher. In the case of a company bidding to advertise on searches for that company’s own name, it means that the company can win the bid with a lower offer than competitors trying to put ads there. You could say Google is extorting Verizon to pay up to prevent competitors from steal…

That they pay little doesn't matter. What matters is that it's above zero, which is what the clicks would cost without the ad, making them unprofitable. The competitor argument for running the ad has two problems. The first is that no competitors are bidding for that keyword, and the second is that a competitor would already have to pay a lot to get top of page placement for a keyword they can't put in their ad copy.

Not sure why you think an ad wouldn’t work here. Sometimes customers are willing to switch to a competing product. If you can offer something better or cheaper they might want it. I’ve worked at a company where we at times bought Google ads for both our own product name and competitor’s names and made money.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#249

> Private company tells other private company which speech they should be censoring Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication. "But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?" Wake the hell up. Read…

It's extremely frustrating being someone left leaning that believes in the principals of free speech. It seems like all of the alternatives to the censored platforms, are naturally majority populated by the right. This polarizing effect squeezes out any productive centrist discussion or debate.

Whichever opinion is currently being frowned on by society, will always be more prominent in the fringes. The left will talk about how right-wing conservatism is the current populist trend until they're blue in the face, but the reality is that the only people being censured by the media, universities, private companies, etc. are people with right-leaning views. I don't agree with all of them, but I can't remember the last time I read an article about a professor being let go for being an "extreme leftist". Being extreme-left is seen as being brave, pushing the envelope, exploring new ideas, fresh, edgy but interesting etc. Being extreme right is seen as dangerous, fringe, unacceptable, backwards, and so on. And so what happens, is that one side begins to feel cheated by the system, left out of popular discourse, and will then turn to alternative platforms to discuss their ideas. And hence you get the less mainstream, more free speech loving platforms being right dominated.

This is why I firmly believe that all sides should be allowed to share views. The best way for bad ideas to be shown for what they are, is for them to be debated publicly. Unfortunately, that is not what we are seeing happen. And that also means that anybody who isn't censured, thinks they're onto something good. It gives them an inflated sense of worth. See: Twitter checkmarks.

Re: Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

#250
post #206
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concern is that some people working in tech companies and media may define "hate" as anything to the right of Karl Marx, even well-researched centrist positions. If this is true, then I can easily see why policing of political content is seen as censorship.

Facebook already has a definition for hate speech and this boycott is not asking for any changes to that definition so complaints about how anyone but Facebook defines hate speech is mostly irrelevant.

They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left leaning Social Science departments. If they attempted to fill those slots with centrists then they'd be decryed for not using the "real experts" or something similar.

On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and not the traditional definition [1]. Calling a white person a Karen seems to have definite racist qualities but it's perfectly acceptable for some reason. Calling someone a N* means people applaud when you get beat up.

I'll trust the "experts" when racism is applied in both directions.

[1] - prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group

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