81–90 of 106 posts
> "A few months into maintaining my Trump online identities, I started feeling that I needed to buy guns. I knew it was irrational and impractical given my lack of training and urban lifestyle. Nonetheless I was convinced I needed them. When I told my girlfriend, her perplexed response made me realize how deeply my mind had been manipulated by my pro-Trump Facebook feeds." Exactly the kind of effect Facebook is selli…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cops and security don’t generally carry ar-15’s You’re in for a surprise if you ever look in a patrol car. Every agency I know of, even in a very rural state, has an AR as standard equipment - either in the cabin, or in rare cases, in a trunk lid mount.
Googled which weapons cops have out of curiousity and the AR-15 isn't in the top 10 according to this list: https://www.criminaljusticedegreehub.com/popular-guns-for-la...
The end of that list shows the M4 carbine - which is an AR-15.
In popular vernacular, an “M4” is a shortened version of the “M16”, which is the military version of the “AR-15”. Armalite originated the design and Colt licensed it.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the high points.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they could address the whole "there is a way to circumventing the system" thing? I mean, they own the system, so they should probably be responsible for any circumvention.
They're not circumventing the system, they're circumventing the false positives of the gun-detection algorithm. As the parent pointed out, advertising these gun-related things is explicitly allowed by Facebook.
I'm not completely sure this is just political people. Up until recently I only got ads for kickstarter doodads and airtable, but then it suddenly switched to gun stuff. I don't browse any firearm or political communities, haven't bought stuff, don't watch firearm youtube videos, haven't even been window shopping. There were 5 million new gun owners last year. I think the ad networks just view it as a highly probable…
Yesterday I googled "how to measure a chainsaw bar" and got targeted by a clothing company running a sale for tactical clothing, including what I can only describe as domestic terror outfits. It was striking to me to type in a single atypical search term and then be immediately cast into a completely different advertising cohort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest myth out there is that FB is somehow detached from the ads they permit on their website because of "it's the algorithm" or "we're just a platform". It's obviously complete BS.
The people who build FB's ads platform have their performance judged by metrics like revenue, eCPM, and internal relevance scores. Building capabilities to add arbitrary human-defined rules into those optimization functions only makes their jobs more difficult and is a drag on hitting team targets. I'm curious why you think they're incentivized to do so.
Let's be more sympathetic to the little guys.
First of all, fb ad policy explicitly doesn’t allow selling fire arms. https://m.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/weapo... If you are selling related stuff(belts, holster, vest, gun case etc), be prepared to have your fb ad account banned often(as the algo will likely (mis)-categorize you into selling weapons). Advertisers in this space generally are very good at 1) cloaking, 2) renting or purchasing ad a…
Maybe they could address the whole "there is a way to circumventing the system" thing? I mean, they own the system, so they should probably be responsible for any circumvention.