141–150 of 236 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police. Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by conti…
I don't believe GP was suggesting Facebook do it; rather just pointing out that the second option is extremely costly and difficult, which is a consequence of the scale and influence of Facebook
Is it? Suppose that instead of Facebook we had a federated social media with ten thousand independent operators and ten thousand ad networks. Then there would be ten thousand ad agents (really automated websites) who compete on price and whose job it is to place your ad in the ten thousand ad networks.
Drug dealers would still try to run drug ads, wouldn't they? What would be any different? The internet has the scale that it does whether the service is centralized or not. Centralization/monopolies are the cause of many problems but not every problem.
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.
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…
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.
Any favorites?
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…
The flaw here is in expecting Facebook to be the police. Here's what happens if you make Facebook do it. They become aware of someone running an illegal ad and ban them. But the advertiser is a criminal and still wants to make money, so they make a new account or find some way to avoid detection, and the ad ends up back in the system, and the advertiser can do this forever because they're making a net profit by conti…
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…
I don't think it's actually that easy. In the US, we have Section 230[1], which says > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Seems to me, that says if you have a problem with the advertisement, you need to go to the source, not the ad network. You're proposing an exception for advertiseme…
If you use algorithms to selectively choose which content the user gets exposed to (in an objective to increase your profits obviously), this is literally the definition of a publisher.
We are way past the "we just provide a dumb pipe for content between publishers and users". The pipe is no longer dumb and hasn't been for over a decade.
> “DMT,” a psychedelic drug. I would argue that. It's probably the least offensive thing, compared to alcohol you can buy everywhere. DMT and other entheogens are far less harmful than alcoholic drinks available. It's confirmed by many academic papers, and DMT is not something people use for recreational purposes. Moreover, some of these "psychedelic drugs" are used by people who have serious illness, wether it is li…
I totally agree, but why do you think people don't use DMT recreationally?
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…
Succinctly put. Just as LLCs function as a legal device to distributing and limiting financial risk (but strangely, not profits), they increasingly perform the same function for other kinds of legal liability. It's the worst of both worlds.