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In the puritanical West, selling your private data to the government is good, buying drugs from a rando on Instagram is bad. Stifling.
This is, I think, the real moral hazard you saw back in the 2007 financial crisis: companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies. I'd include Uber's grey area stalking[2] and the eBay stalking campaign[3] in this category.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/doj-settles-with-facebook-ov...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12127638/uber-ergo-invest...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow, I didn't even know they ran YT ads?²
Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff.
¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage" trading bot with ChatGPT, usually, claiming it earns them passive income of varying amounts, but often on the order of $1M USD/y. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The code actually just steals your money.
²(not that I really think SCs are a formal collective of sorts, I just … don't really think that would be a thing I'd see.)
Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so). Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.
I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family. It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of
Are drug ads bad because of the war on drugs? Are they bad because we won’t let tobacco make ads? The only way this seems shockingly bad is that you can’t actually control what you see as a user of these ad-supported services or if you support the war on drugs.
I'm actually really glad that some companies like this are not really beholden to advertisers anymore. I don't like how that influences social norms per country outside of the legal system, based on what advertisers believe. I like that there is no collective voice possible that could get enough advertisers to leave Meta over disagreeing with a Meta practice.
I'm into lawsuits from private persons and the government. Just not social mobs.
YouTube has been hitting me up with "ads" which are Ethereum scams¹ recently. Of what I've reported, 60% are still up. Some of these were reported in March. Recently I also got an "ad" for what was almost certainly Sovereign Citizen propaganda, which … wow , I didn't even know they ran YT ads?² Today's ads (since I checked just to see for this comment) is all normal stuff. ¹they allege to have written an "arbitrage"…
Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve continually gotten magic mushroom gummy advertisements
These are likely for muscimol gummies as opposed to psylocybin gummies. Despite having psychoactive components muscimol containing mushrooms (Amanita Muscaria, etc.) are legal, as is muscimol itself.
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Because there is absolutely zero evidence that there are drugs being physically trafficked at Meta's offices? What should happen is that a court should be able to drag responsible executives in front of a judge, issue massive fines for what has already happened, and order that Meta stop running ads until they can present an agreeable plan to prevent these kinds of ads from running. Then they should be under a consent…
Well that's not why they would raid Meta. They would raid them to preserve evidence and documents of Meta's complicity with the drug trafficking that does occur on their platforms.