91–100 of 145 posts
Advertisements are mind control. Look around you. How many brand logos do you see? Each brand logo is an attempt to influence and manipulate how you feel, think and spend your money but your subconscious blocks them all out.
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>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it. As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all t…
> I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) Hehehe very true. I tell people what works then they ask me to do random shit. I can't deny you are right at the end of the day I do what they will pay for whether it works or not.
Yes, there are things that can't be measured well. Smart operators tend to not do those things, no matter how common or popular they are.
The very old joke "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" (John Wanamaker, 1838-1922) was always more about advertising companies pushing advertising than about whether results could be measured.
In politics, look at real people on social media sharing false information and commenting about how they agree with it. Politics is the easiest place for advertising to succeed, because you can use mind control techniques more readily (where you need an "other group" to dislike to cement the self-perception being sold).
It's not a very good article and others have criticized it fairly, but I just want to harp on the constant degradation of anything even remotely resembling "conspiracy theory" as innately batshit crazy, delusion, and based on some on some other reason than any form of logic (as the author attempts towards the end dismissing it as entertainment). Of course those versions of "conspiracy theory" exist, but there is a va…
Tell any given hall-monitor type about a seemingly coordinated effort toward a single goal, then watch them scoff and dismiss. It is so tiresome.
Then reveal the steady paychecks behind the effort--that the endeavor was ordinary commerce all along--and watch the same awful people hamster up even more fantastical conspiracy theories to support the original take.
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The power vacuum at the top has existed since before then. Commissioners' terms started expiring, without being replaced, in 2007. It's practically impossible for them to devote resources to new things like online activities. And the organization has always been under-staffed. Investigating a charge is difficult. They have to prove their case in order to sanction anybody -- and they have limited power to act even whe…
> Its ability to track down violations is limited, and growing more limited by the day. I hate to actually don a tin foil hat given the title of this particular HN submission, but is it not possible that this is all by design? I mean, aren't politicians the ones who are, at once, in charge of making sure that organization is effective, and at the same time beneficiaries of any ineffectiveness in that same organizatio…
The situation has always been precarious, but especially for the last decade, during which some have benefited more than others.
Advertisements are mind control. Look around you. How many brand logos do you see? Each brand logo is an attempt to influence and manipulate how you feel, think and spend your money but your subconscious blocks them all out.
I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias. Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority…
By way of alternative, I'd suggest not consuming news at all. Or at least, delaying your consumption of news to sources that have had a chance to digest and consider the news, such as a weekly news magazine. It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually-updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping yo…
My preferred general news programme is On the Media, a weekly broadcast (and podcast) by WNYC Studios, nominally examining the media itself, almost always in the context of current news, or some background with relevance to current news.
The show runs an "NPR hour" (about 51 minutes), and covers four stories, devoting about 15 minutes to each. It's generally finalised on Friday, and broadcast Saturday / Sunday in most markets. Segments based on an interview with a subject-matter expert, rarely a typical bloviating talking head, occasionally someone directly involved in a story. The interviews are closely edited.
The result is a concise, thoughtful, informed summary of major events of the past week, without the drama, emotion, and raw churn of the usual 24/7 news cycle. Yes, you'll miss out on a bunch of stories, the vast majority of which don't matter.
The hosts, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, are excellent, with a biting dry humour. Brooke's "mmm-hmm"s can speak volumes.
The biggest ommission is whatever local news is relevant to you. Unfortunately, that's a news hole that's not being filled by much of anyone at the moment, outside a very few large markets (NYC, Washington, London, in English-language markets).
I'll also take an occasional scan of centrist headlines (Reuters of late), which tends to be very solidly balanced. Financial Times has a good rundown as well. Note that I try to restrict this scan to just headlines.
For complex and evolving stories -- the current coronavirius outbreak is an example, though the first case I'd noted was the 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -- Wikipedia articles make for excellent ongoing summaries of best current information. Vastly superior to virtually any news outlet. (Brad Plumer's Oroville Dam coverage at Vox being a notable exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16538941)
20 years ago, strictly, before the Elian Gonzales story, I'd have suggested NPR's news magazines (Morning Edition, All Things Considered) as well worth the time. I no longer feel this, and haven't for a well over a decade. When NPR was more a suffering network without realtime capabilities, stories were submitted, edited, prepared, and largely rolled from tape. The 9/11 attacks made the network aware of its "dark secret" that much of the news programme was in fact pre-recorded. Whilst a negative in the case of critical breaking news, for the most part I'd argue this was a hidden strength of the network, as it had time to at least somewhat digest, consider, and edit what went out on the air. In the past decade, NPR (and other national broadcasters: CBC, BBC, ABC/Australia) have leaned far more on live reports on-air ... leading to worse reporting, far more technical glitches (often in the midst of interviews), and a generally more annoying product. The notion of inserting a slight delay -- 5 minutes even, though an hour or day generally wouldn't hurt -- in the "magazine" coverage would hugely improve the end result.
This is apparently an unpopular opinion.
It's also possible I've simply learned enough to see the holes in much coverage by these outlets.
And I no longer find the urge to listen to news on even a daily basis, as you suggest.
Replacements include several podcasts, notably the back-catalogs of "The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps", "The New Books Network", and "LSE Lectures", all of which present thoughts of experts, distanced from contemporary hubub, at length, and though the direct relationships are reduced, the relevance to what's happening now is often great, with tremendous insight.
An abundance of information means a surfeit of that which inforation consumes: attention. (I believe that's Herbert Simon.) Information overload is really filter failure (Clay Shirky), and a crisis or catastrophe is a time in which previous models of the world no longer fit the present reality (my own notion, though with similarities to numerous others' observations).
We're in the midst of one such catastrophe -- a period of revelation, not in the religious sense, but in the way of a falling away of scales of no-longer-appropriate models.
(This is one of the problems with news coverage as journalism attempts to fit current events into pre-existing narratives -- when those narratives are false, the reportage similarly fails.)
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For me there is a difference tho: when the Guardian does it, it is public . That means if your political view differs from that of the Guardian you can still read it, comment it, write an article in another outlet about it. So basically: you are creating public political discourse about it. In targeted advertisement no such public space exists and political discourse on the ads is hard. A political party could target…
Today media outlets are private companies that are arguably in between filling their role as the fourth estate and entertainment. They do not offer much public space, they just are the traditional proxies for citizens to reach public officials. To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there…
This isn't true for targeted (mis-)information campaigns on social media. If you e.g. were leaning to the political right, you wouldn't be able to discuss the ridiculous information someone on the political left might be exposed to, because you are very unlikely to see them in time (or at all). At the same time nothing would stop you to go to the Guardian website and read the article as anybody else.
That very aspect is the the key difference between public discourse and targeted ads. It doesn't really matter whether the media is biased or whether targeted manipulation works: one is doing it public (and can be subjected to scrutiny) and the other isn't.
Where traditional media necessarily always has to be selective about what they present us, targeted ads are not only selective in what they present us, they are also basing it on who we are. And because they can target people who are likely to share that view anyways there will be very little friction and public scrutiny. This naturally doesn't help with the quality of the information when it comes to truthfulness and divides people up: they no longer inhabit the same planet anymore in terms of truth and information.
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>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it. As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all t…
Thank you. Most advertising does nothing. I'm sick of people lazily assuming that people that don't vote the way they do must have been manipulated. It is a self-defeating idea in the first place. By the way the Cambridge analytica data was incredibly similar to something that I used working for a democratic campaign in 2014 midterm elections. Trump and brexit both won with voters due to the fact that we have for yea…
I think you can't avoid the fact that narrative plays a huge role, and that facebook played its own part in both informing and disseminating that narrative.
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Exactly. Moreover, the second sentence gets it entirely backwards >The previously little-known company, reporters claimed, had used behavioral influencing techniques to turn out social media users to vote in both elections. The major Cambridge Analytica push was not to increase turnout of supporters, it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters. E.g., finding black voters and highlighting Hillar…
> it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters. Surely you're aware that political mudslinging ads have been a thing since like, forever, right? > finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators" Maybe don't say such crazy things, don't have to worry about someone calling you out on it. I don't recall her campaign ever addressing this issue, I don't recall…
A fine example was in the 2000 South Carolina primary when Karl Rove working for Bush, distributed door-to-door flyers just ahead of the primary that implied that John McCain had an illegitimate black baby from an affair. McCain had actually adopted a child from Bangladesh. McCain lost the primary.
Similarly with the HRC issue. It is one thing to have it in the news - or not, quite another to specifically harvest by 280 point tested psychological profiles the people who will be most receptive to changing their behavior by that argument, then silently targeting them in personalized advert campaigns that cannot even be discovered (FB doesn't make public the ads & targeting).
This is about scalability - just like speeding tickets have been a think since, like, forever, but the cops have to be there, or at least post a camera. This is more like if they started handing out tickets via tracking GPS, for every second you exceed the limit.
Same law/situation, scalable technology, entirely different implications.
The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works. Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!". > The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company The…
>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it. As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all t…