111–120 of 236 posts
Is "hundreds" supposed to be a large amount? How many ads has Facebook run for Mountain Dew?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
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"…
You have to hint to the YouTube AI to give you different ads. Just mobile signed into your primary gmail account you’ll see they’re night and day different from desktop/tv. The old android device I use for streaming in the kitchen with an alternate gmail account? That’s where they really get good.
I mean, I could, but there's nothing in that for me except the work of doing it.
Even reporting them to YT is a charity I perform mostly on the off hope that they'll get taken down so that some other person isn't scammed, but as you can see, that is met with limited success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?
At some point Google must have some responsibility regarding this mess, they can't reasonably say that they do not know anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes... Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.
So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?
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.
They do? If I got the NYT to print an ad for crack what would happen to me and the NYT?
I reckon NYT might be a little more tuned into this due to still being a news org with print still going and likely having more restrictions on their web ads due to this, but other platforms you could get away with that no problem as noted from various sources like https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5p38b/ketamine-therapy-inst... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/opinion/ketamine-ads-depr...
https://archive.md/D4EnE edit: hm, maybe this isn't working for the full articles on WSJ anymore...
World's easiest problem to solve if we just get the political will to do so: Pass a law requiring a human being to sign off in "writing" (can be eSigned through an internal moderation platform) on any ad that will be run that the platform will profit from and that will be pushed to users by choice of the platform as opposed to request by the user. This human serves as an agent who will be liable along with their firm…
This is a great analogy. You can't actually afford to run this at scale legally? Too bad.
This is part of a larger pattern for Facebook and other "large scale" advertisers where it's clear they are breaking laws at some rate and are protected from paying a real consequence by the cost of discovering the exact rate of misbehavior. Facebook recently settled a lawsuit related to racially discriminating in housing ads (a federal crime)[1]. I suspect this will get added to the pile of illegal services Facebook…
Music has always been a great way to advertise drugs and other criminal acts, however, they never get chosen to get arrested.