Weaponizing Ads: How Google and Facebook Ads Are Used to Wage Propaganda Wars

Maybe a month ago, I started getting bombareded with every element of the right wing media ecosphere on Facebook. "Trump for President", Ben Shapiro, JD Vance, and piles of dogwhistle-named Facebook pages who are reaching for every way to feel relevant.

Just recently, all of them, in-concert, started trying to focus on the lady who stole that Baseball at that game. All they are talking about for the last week. Promoted content, sent directly to people's facebook profiles.

Whether or not I feel nationalist terrorists are running the US government, either way I feel the government shouldn't be working this closely with social media. It's extremely dystopian, and it cheapens everything around it.

This makes me wonder why people put up with targeted content whatsoever. I actually have a friend who works in game development, and he has a real chip on his should regarding the current attitude that the discoverable customer base has. For instance, he sees a lot of people who think developers are pushing things down people's throats, are making games bad or annoying on purpose just so that users get frustrated, etc. It's pretty disheartening to him since from his perspective everyone is just doing the best they can, sometimes with quite poor results given the constraints of the market. But ultimately, they really just want to make games that people love and are really try to do so.

My personal theory is that people broadly are becoming very thick skinned with regard to content being pushed on them, but at the same time it has not occurred to people to simply disengage. (ie, they're getting frustrated by the pushers, but aren't leaving forums, social media, youtube, etc. so that no one can push anything on them) I think in some of the darker corners of the web, you currently see this associated with the term "slop." I assume we're all familiar with metaphor. Most of our waking lives (assuming we're on normal platforms) someone is out trying to twist your arm to get your attention, to get you outraged or jealous; anything for attention.

I really think it's breeding an incredible amount of unthinking cynicism, and at least some of the negativity you find online is just related to all the different wars for attention. As noted, it's quite surprising just how many people won't step away from this crazy attention marketplace. It's easy to do in principle: Put down your phone, your computer, and read a book or take a walk. In practice, it's more like overeating; people were never built with impulse control against novelty and social outrage, and lacking the fundamentals most people fail this test.

Good point. Has me thinking: In any field, over time, there's R&D for it to become more effective. How this progression might apply to marketing:

1. Printed ads, newspapers, billboards, magazines -- You can explain your product and show a picture of what it looks like to demonstrate the value to customers

2. Television ads, black and white -- We can demonstrate the value to customers so well!

3. Wait a minute, if we put music in the TV ads, the songs get stuck in peoples' heads, this is good for our brand

4. Color TV Ads -- We have all the previous benefits but can get more attention with color!

5. We can target regional TV ads in different parts of the country!

6. Oh, we can target any ad based on demographics on social media? This will be effective

7. Ok, now we want to keep targeting ads, but we're gonna A/B test multiple versions of the ads in real time to maximize effectiveness

8. Ok, I need to maximize effectiveness of this ad, let me generate an AI mockup of the product I'm selling to create an illusion of the lifestyle my brand represents

My point is, marketing has been optimized over time and will continue to optimize for profit in the future, and the result has been a divergence in the actual goal of marketing: We've gone from "Demonstrate the value of our product" to "Create an illusion of our lifestyle".

To change the first amendment such that it no longer applied to the speech of political parties would amount to a revolution. Even if it were somehow accomplished without violence, it would deeply change the form of government.

Corporations are picking the side that's in power. If team blue is in power they would pick blue. Corporations are (usually) not moral or inherently politically motivated other than to the extent of optimizing short term shareholder value.