81–90 of 109 posts
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"Information" is not what's being presented in YouTube ads. And non-incumbents/non-oligarchs can't afford to run those ads anyways.
It costs as little as $10 a day to run ads on YouTube. Getting results realistically requires higher spend, but a few thousand dollars can make a decent impact. Whereas traditional ad agencies and TV networks require orders of magnitude more spend to get started. Those are the placements you need oligarchs friends for.
We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.
I wish they'd stop serving scams too. I keep seeing shit like "make 75,000 using Ethereum and ChatGPT"
I wish they'd stop serving scams too. I keep seeing shit like "make 75,000 using Ethereum and ChatGPT"
Scams in online advertising are ubiquitous, I'm amazed adtech companies don't seem to see any consequences for it. I really think there needs to be an onus on online advertisers to prove that the products and services they promote are not scams before anything gets exposed to the public. I see adblockers as essential security tools at this point, however you dress it up one of the main functions of adtech in the pres…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It costs as little as $10 a day to run ads on YouTube. Getting results realistically requires higher spend, but a few thousand dollars can make a decent impact. Whereas traditional ad agencies and TV networks require orders of magnitude more spend to get started. Those are the placements you need oligarchs friends for.
Or, you have a sensible system which bans political ads on TV / print / etc, and grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places. We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.
Power is a zero sum game. Banning adverts and paid media strengthens the influence of organic media like journalists, social media and podcasters.
In the US context, that might've strengthened the Trump campaign's position relative to Harris - given the higher follower counts and podcast views.
> grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.
The UK does something like this with free ad segments on linear TV at election times for major parties. However, the effectiveness has decreased with falling TV viewership.
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Sure, but feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests is worse than creators making a bit less.
Like the sibling commenter, I don't get it. If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? And if someone puts a filter on the garbage that reaches impressionable people, then, being so impressionable, won't they be influenced by whoever controls the filter?
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Like the sibling commenter, I don't get it. If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? And if someone puts a filter on the garbage that reaches impressionable people, then, being so impressionable, won't they be influenced by whoever controls the filter?
> what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny. > If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good. Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting too…
Yes.
What is the instrument for measuring societal good? And what is the mechanism for acting upon those measurements? My naive understanding is that in a society that purports to be democratic, societal good is expressed through votes (people vote for things they deem to be good, or for people who promise to bring those things about), and the enactment of those measurements is done through the same mechanism.
> Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes. Now we need a mechanism that establishes the goodness of faith of the informer. And if the past five or so years have taught me anything it is that barely anyone who plays professional-league politics speaks in good faith.
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Like the sibling commenter, I don't get it. If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? And if someone puts a filter on the garbage that reaches impressionable people, then, being so impressionable, won't they be influenced by whoever controls the filter?
It is more to limit a foreign entity's grasp on controlling the mindset of their citizens. You can compare the feeds of teens in China vs the US on TikTok
If the premise is that the mindset of citizens is so easily controllable that a foreign entity can do it, then why is a foreign entity's control of citizens' mindset any worse than domestic entity's control of the same? If people have no protection against the control of their mindset, then does it not follow that their minds will be controlled by _some_ entity? Isn't the game already lost at that point? And are we really discussing whom we would rather surrender our minds to?
Article says this has been done other places already. Has this specifically been campaign ads or does it also involve things that are considered politically motivated messaging? For example, is there danger of vaccination PSAs getting banned because some politicians say bizarre things about them?
I would hope so. The government paying private companies to spread its propaganda is bad for many reasons.
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Acknowledging the deliberate rampant misinformation campaigns doesn't make you an elitist.
But claiming that people vote against their interests and the assumption that you know better than them what their interests are makes you one.