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YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

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Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#371

Post by yreg »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #113
iteratethis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to sign up to become a community notes contributor. Then you can add notes, and if enough people from a diverse set of other contributors find it helpful, the community note will publicly appear. It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.

> It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. Elon doesn't think so. I would expect it to change soon. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1733882978781053383

Not really, Elon is quite proud of community notes in general. His claim that a particular note was gamed means nothing.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#372

Post by cactusplant7374 »

yreg wrote: post #371
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. Elon doesn't think so. I would expect it to change soon. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1733882978781053383

Not really, Elon is quite proud of community notes in general. His claim that a particular note was gamed means nothing.

He thought polls were awesome too but then he changed it to paid subscribers only because of “manipulation,” I think?

Dramatic changes will likely happen.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#373

Post by benterix »

Takennickname wrote: post #72
bluGill wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odd…

You are almost irrelevant to the conversation. The scammers only need 100 people to believe them from the potentially millions of people who view their ad to make it profitable. You are not grasping the scale of the matter.

Well, I guess it might change. I witnessed an exchange between two women, one was saying she would consider buying something after she saw an ad on Instagram, the other one laughed, "but you know ads on Instagram are scams, don't you"?

So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#374

Post by kmeisthax »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #356
kmeisthax wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't care about the context, they care about who pays the most for the ad. Hungarian fascists have deep pockets[0] and are willing to spend shittons of money to make you watch lies about immigrants[1]. Most of that money is wasted, but if they can radicalize even one out of a million viewers, they won. So they pay loads for it. Yes, this is the same math that scammers run on - because fascism is a scam cate…

>because fascism is a scam category, alongside advanced-fee fraud, refund scammers, and fake tech support companies. Facism or not, those heavy ad campaigns come from the most extreme ends of the spectrum. And the new age will adapt to new tech faster. It's no suprise this is the result of it all, especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them. >For the same reasons as above, t…

The problem isn't just bad ads, it's ad targeting. Bad advertisers love targeting because it does surveillance work for them, at scale. If Google did not offer targeted advertising, bad advertising would be far less effective and easier to spot. In fact, we know this because after Apple turned ad tracking IDs into an opt-in affair, iPhone users suddenly stopped falling for scams as often.

> especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them

CDA Section 230 (or just "CDA 230"), and this actually isn't the reason why platforms get away with this shit. All CDA 230 says is that moderating your platform doesn't mean you're liable for defamation that you miss. This is because of a prior court case that litigated the opposite. The Wolf of Wall Street[0] sued two online services for not taking down speech he wanted to censor. One of them was ruled as not liable because they didn't take down anything; the other was ruled as liable because they took down something.

So taking away CDA 230 would do is turn every forum more moderated than 4chan into a censorship hellscape as rich people perpetually demanded any speech they didn't like be taken down, or worse, sued companies into oblivion for hosting your own speech. You would not be able to sue Google because they served you a fake Elon Musk crypto grift ad any more than you already are able to.

What you really want is to copypaste EU GDPR into US law. This would make ad targeting illegal, which thus would make scam advertising ineffective, because scams rely on surveillance in order to scale.

[0] As in, the guy the movie was about

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#375

Post by albedoa »

bschne wrote: post #221
albedoa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be serious. It is a daily meme that Twitter ads are all scams now because all of the legitimate advertisers are leaving. That's why it is an interesting , news-worthy event when a community note is attached to an ad.

I am serious! In an ideal world, Twitter/X would have more legitimate advertisers to keep the platform running, and also would have adequate content moderation that quickly got rid of the scams, through some combination of tech and human oversight. They are, and I am not debating that, doing pretty badly at that currently -- I get a few of the scam ads daily, ranging from misleading freemium games (sketchy) to sites…

My guy, you are the mark.
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