Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 109 posts

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#91

Post by valval »

azangru wrote: post #88
hackernewds wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hear this concern a lot; but never could quite grasp it. 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_ enti…

I don’t think it’s a more complex subject than “these people are ours to control, not yours”.

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#92

Post by Aardwolf »

Mashimo wrote: post #17
Aardwolf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper flyers in your mailbox, and billboards in people's gardens, are some age-old and very common forms of advertisement during elections I've seen in multiple countries in Europe

Interesting. Where are billboards on private property common? I mostly see them on tv, public billboards and light poles.

Here's an example: https://img.nieuwsblad.be/vXdqo10D824EJ6p5Ab4IBfARaZs=/960x6...

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#93

Post by tivert »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #19

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"

I love those scam ads. They're so entertaining. I actually try to download my favorites sometimes.

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#94

Post by tivert »

anonzzzies wrote: post #23
xena wrote: post #15

YouTube creators are going to be upset by this, political ads in election years have a CPM of upwards of $5. It makes up a lot of their income.

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.

> 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.

If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests.

While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individual voter makes is their completely valid choice.

And honestly, lectures about how XYZ represents the voter's interest and they must vote for that candidate otherwise they're somehow "doing it wrong" is itself a class of "feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests."

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#95

Post by azangru »

valval wrote: post #91
azangru wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this concern a lot; but never could quite grasp it. 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_ enti…

I don’t think it’s a more complex subject than “these people are ours to control, not yours”.

Yes, I agree.

But in a presumably democratic society, I would have thought, people would need convincing to submit to this claim.

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#96

Post by tivert »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #90
ReptileMan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But claiming that people vote against their interests and the assumption that you know better than them what their interests are makes you one.

People do vote against their interests. Full stop. We have agreed there is misinformation. Who is doing it and why? Is it people not in power who have no resources manipulating people in power? Or is it people in power who have the resources manipulating people not in power? The answer is obviously the latter. And if it's people in power doing it, they are doing it for their own good. They are not doing it benevolent…

> People do vote against their interests. Full stop.

If you're not talking about the normal compromises every voter needs to make between competing priorities, then I think you should own your position and advocate that you yourself be given the power to exercise those voters votes on their behalf, since you claim to know what their interests are better than they do.

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#97

Post by 6510 »

ReptileMan wrote: post #73
6510 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designing a voting system that requires an informed objective voter is hard but not impossible. It would be fun to run a test system in parallel. Try different thing in different locations with each election. (results discarded) Say, if you want a person to go places and do several things. Surely if you don't pay them for the work you don't get to complaint about quality? Voting for issues as well or in stead of cand…

It is incompatible with universal franchise because some people jusy don't want to be that kind of viter. And if we are not doing universal franchise let's just go full starship troopers.

The fun of democracy is that some people will just have to suck it up. Not everyone needs to approve of elections by the proverbial battle royal to the death.

I wrote this software I call subjective sort. The algo is this: Everyone gets to chose from just 2 options but they are chosen randomly. So you would get a ballot with Jill Stein and Afroman on it. We give you some time to read/view some about their election program. You pick one, they get +1 the other -1. If there are enough participants this bubbles the list from best to worse. By comparison well informed choices.

The demo sorts countries by population. I don't even know where some of them are but it works.

https://subjective-sort.go-here.nl

enjoy

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#98

Post by rgreekguy »

Great news, if some years too late... The one time I tried to turn off the ad-block on YouTube, I gave up because of political ads. Now I'm not going back for other reasons, too.

Also some tracking parameters were added on the URL. Not sure if it's from Hacker News, or from rejecting cookies, or what.

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#99

Post by StackRanker3000 »

tivert wrote: post #96
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do vote against their interests. Full stop. We have agreed there is misinformation. Who is doing it and why? Is it people not in power who have no resources manipulating people in power? Or is it people in power who have the resources manipulating people not in power? The answer is obviously the latter. And if it's people in power doing it, they are doing it for their own good. They are not doing it benevolent…

> People do vote against their interests. Full stop. If you're not talking about the normal compromises every voter needs to make between competing priorities, then I think you should own your position and advocate that you yourself be given the power to exercise those voters votes on their behalf, since you claim to know what their interests are better than they do.

So do you really think there are no people who have ever voted against their own interests because they were misled, or even lied to?

That doesn’t mean that they should be disenfranchised, but perhaps it’s worth looking into how those people can be better informed, and thus enabled to vote for options that actually align with the outcomes they desire?

Re: Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube

#100

Post by tzs »

tivert wrote: post #94
anonzzzies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests. While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individua…

Yes, usually you have to vote against some of your own interests because no candidate lines up perfectly with your interests.

When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.

I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.

For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.

I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.

But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.

Post reply on HN