91–100 of 101 posts
Drinking harms the adolescent brain. Why comment about how “it’s legal there” or “teens already do it” or “it’s really the advertisers’ fault”? Where does defending Facebook’s behavior get you?
Pass laws to make it illegal to advertise to people under 18. We somehow expect FB to arbitrate but that’s just not possible. It isn’t even their fault in the end - they operate within legal boundaries. We should make it unlawful to advertise to people under 18 and prosecute offenders, harshly.
Yes, let's get ads out of cartoons and out of newspapers that carry comics sections. I'm sure that will go well.
Without a link to the actual report, which hopefully contains more information, anyone who's ever spent $5 running a campaign on FB would know this is a little suspicious. You can upload content to your hearts content, but ads are not actually 'approved' until they running. And there's no way to actually 'target' without running an ad ... which they didn't do ... so ... If they were looking for hard evidence, they co…
Inline with your point, the report states that the ads were not actually run, which kind of invalidates their argument. They state they were ‘approved’.
But their motivation was likely to get a specific headline across the media, and that appears to be working.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies - specifically large public for-profit companies - are amoral entities solely concerned with maximizing their profits. That Facebook acts seemingly without any morals isn't all that surprising.
This is such a “le late stage capitalism” sentiment that I see posted all the time. It completely misrepresents the responsibility of a public company to operate in its shareholders’ best interest.
Which is commonly understood in just financial terms. But when you think about it in a more open way, shareholders have children, too, and any action of the company that is negative for the society cannot be said it's in shareholders' best interest. (This is regardless of whether what the report says is actually true.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cannabis is illegal at a federal level.
so is minors gambling (which is this case) - and also these ads never ran. so no change for cannabis and we can put our pitchforks down.
Without a link to the actual report, which hopefully contains more information, anyone who's ever spent $5 running a campaign on FB would know this is a little suspicious. You can upload content to your hearts content, but ads are not actually 'approved' until they running. And there's no way to actually 'target' without running an ad ... which they didn't do ... so ... If they were looking for hard evidence, they co…
Yes, this reads like it was written by someone who has never run a real Facebook ad. Facebook routinely accidentally blocks legitimate advertisers from running normal, compliant ads, and there's a massive underground devoted to beating Facebook's algorithms to get non-compliant ads running. This looks like they just got lucky with a few ad sets, and since they never set them active, it looks like they might've not be…
And they're extremely successful - I see several such ads every day. They vary from microdosing (using drugs is illegal here) to obvious scams. It looks FB completely got rid of manual review and decided algorithms can approve ads. And it failed spectacularly because any algorithm can be gamed by a creative human. Who is held accountable for it? Nobody. Something that has negative influence on others lives is presented as just a glitch in the system, not a result of an ethical decision "Yes, we can accept some percentage of scams as long as we maximize value from serving ads."
Without a link to the actual report, which hopefully contains more information, anyone who's ever spent $5 running a campaign on FB would know this is a little suspicious. You can upload content to your hearts content, but ads are not actually 'approved' until they running. And there's no way to actually 'target' without running an ad ... which they didn't do ... so ... If they were looking for hard evidence, they co…
A good journalist has a pretty strict code of ethics that they won’t cross under any circumstances. Getting an ad approved without running it doesn’t cross the code of ethics for most journalists, but running it would (even for 5 minutes; don’t blame them, selling gambling to random kids is bad for any amount of minutes, especially if you can’t go and debrief your victims).
I think getting an ad like this approved is news worthy in and of it self, even though nothing illegal nor immoral was directly demonstrated. What was demonstrated is the potential for this to happen, and that what you would expect to be a safeguard against this (an approval process) is either not a safeguard at all or is insufficient. Either way it is news worthy (albeit the latter case a lot more news worthy; but harder to investigate).
The problem with facebook is that it is so personalized and it is really hard for a third party to investigate any other person’s experience. For a journalist investigating what goes on for other people is hard at best. Seeing what gets approved is one way of investigating.
Pass laws to make it illegal to advertise to people under 18. We somehow expect FB to arbitrate but that’s just not possible. It isn’t even their fault in the end - they operate within legal boundaries. We should make it unlawful to advertise to people under 18 and prosecute offenders, harshly.
> Pass laws to make it illegal to advertise to people under 18. Yes, let's get ads out of cartoons and out of newspapers that carry comics sections. I'm sure that will go well.
It was going pretty well actually but has been watered down in the recent years with the proliferation of American content that often contains ad hidden in the content it self.
So if the elephant in the room here (USA) would step up their game and ban ads to children, it would unironically go just fine.
Pass laws to make it illegal to advertise to people under 18. We somehow expect FB to arbitrate but that’s just not possible. It isn’t even their fault in the end - they operate within legal boundaries. We should make it unlawful to advertise to people under 18 and prosecute offenders, harshly.
How in the hell can you expect advertisement in the 21st century to not reach minors? We might as well legislate that all minors must wear blindfolds at all times, or be blinded as they’re born.
I’m pretty sure parent is referring to the latter.