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All political ads running on Google in the US

adstransparency.google.com

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Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell…

If that's what the Fox presenters truly believe, should the government be allowed to censor them?

And this is the crux of the issue.

Most countries don’t have the pretense of free speech, and media is heavily regulated to be ‘fair’ (which means different things in each country).

It has pros and cons.

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#242
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yknow maybe these are just actual us political groups… they have to exist, right?

"Real" legitimate domestic political groups usually have the names of the people running them, with bios, etc. Who founded them, etc. They try to make it easy to figure out who they are so you trust them. When that information is missing it's extremely suspicious, and rightly so.

I think that's a pretty obsolete take that hasn't been reliable since Obama '08 and the "digital strategy".

Not saying anything about "should", zealous downvoters...

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website Are you being straight serious here, or are you doing a rhetoric thing where "I was confused" is just a shorthand for "I think some people might plausibly be confused" ? I could see some people who aren't net-saavy thinking that domain looks like a government website, but I'm surprised that anybody here might see a .com like that…

usps.com. amtrak.com. mta.info. These were just the first that came to mind. I think there are specific reasons behind each of these, but the fact is that I am used to interacting with government websites that end in .com, so it wouldn't surprise me if some county's court system also used a .com.

None of those are government websites.

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#244
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are numerous reasons and everyone has choices. I'm saying that the choices the US made were a major part of bringing about the war. It is 100% upside and the US would do it again. I think keeping NATO out of Ukraine would have been sufficient to avoid the whole conflict. That is without getting into more exotic options.

> And dead Russians. The longer the war goes, the better for the US and NATO. That's the whole reason it exists in the first place. >> there are numerous reasons and everyone has choices >>> I'm saying that the choices the US made were a major part of bringing about the war. Would you like to either not lie outright, or(if I am being charitable) explain yourself fully in the first place? The comment I responded to fr…

> The comment I responded to from you, was saying that the whole reason the war in Ukraine existed was because it was better for NATO and the US.

False. Reread the comment.

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#245

Fascinating stuff. I went down a rabbit hole with this particlar ad: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR132650406472... It links to a website called fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website, and what initially made me curious was the idea of spending money to advertise a government website, getting this additional credibility. Like, if the facts are so strongl…

Looking at that smalltowntruth website reminds me of someone I met in 2015.

I stayed at a guy's airbnb in Denver. He was in breach of his renting agreement by hosting the airbnb and had previously spent about a year in jail (forget for what). He said he had 2 websites that he was promoting on Facebook and were making him money. On one website he posted lots of pro-Trump content and on the other he posted lots of pro-Bernie Sanders content. This was during the primaries so these articles were largely in opposition to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. He said he didn't care about either candidate but both websites were making him good money in ad revenue. He was not actually affiliated with either party.

I wouldn't be surprised if he or someone else like him had scaled up their efforts.

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#246
post #27

Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.

The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.

I guess it's a testament to my daily driver (Brave browser) that I had to Google "what is temu."

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could even say it started with things like Thomas Paine's pamphlet propaganda. It seems the problem is we have a system that was born from the printing press and this system simply doesn't work in the age of the internet. All that really holds it together are these religious sentiments about the inherent good of democracy. Sentiments that have almost nothing to do with lived experience at this point. It seems to…

"vote for me because the other person sucks." seems to be indeed the status quo that politicians in all democracies feel.mlst comfortable with. I think we need to add an "execute everyone on the ballot" option so that politicians have to do positive campaign because if their only contribution is making people disgusted with politics altogether, they'd be risking their lives.

A major problem of the US 2 party system is that there really is someone specifically you can point at to villainize. With multiple parties its much harder to say "everyone except us is a villain" (unless you kinda wanna be seen as crazy), in the worst case it's calling out the extremist parties, which still leaves room for many other parties.

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#248
post #16

From the insights tab, with a date range of the past year, the state where the second most ad money was spent was California (after Pennsylvania). California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?

Recent spending in CA (Sep 1-now) looks like it's heavily landlord associations running ads against prop 33, which would allow for new rent controls.

https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=21137&to...

As a CA voter I find it very awesome that I could look that up so easily.

EDIT: The sort order isn't part of the URL, so you have to sort by Amount spent: high to low -- blew that one Google!

Re: All political ads running on Google in the US

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.

5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump. You could argue it's the native X bias, but these were all the famous billionaires and multimillionaires who are top names in the SV space. All rooting for a Trump win, perhaps anticipating a quick Vance presidency.

> 5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.

From what I heard Bezos interfered with Washington Post for (one of?) the first time to make them not post on endorsing a candidate for president (first time in 36 years).

What the actual reason behind it is is unsure, but they say they wanna "return to their roots". I honestly doubt it and expect its more political interest like to not be on Trumps "land in prison because radical marxist leftist" since he didn't do anything like this in the previous years.

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