Leaked Snapchat emails: Anti-gun group told to pay or NRA ads may appear
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My initial response was that it's a horrible shakedown, but on reflection, I wonder if it really was just Saliterman acting in both Everytown's and his own best interest. If it's a common tactic for the NRA to advertise where possible during anti-gun media, and if it's something Snapchat does not involve itself in mediating for journalistic purposes, then it's entirely possible the team that offered Everytown the free media deal inadvertently set them up to have the NRA run messages during their event, and Saliterman was trying to come across as "hey, I would have advised you against this for this exact reason, as the NRA is trying to get in on your ad spots and that's not something we can really prevent."
How you interpret it is probably highly dependent on your opinions of the companies involved as well as how it is presented here. I only wonder because it seems like it's in vogue to call out bad behavior of tech companies right now, and that undoubtedly leads to at least some articles that purposefully misinterpret events to convey that story.
To be clear, this story certainly makes it sound like a shakedown, and it very well may be. I have no idea if that's what happened here, and I doubt at this point we'll ever know know that it's in the realm of PR spin for damage control, but given that both parties refused to comment, I think chances are high that we're getting the author's assumptions rather than something reasonably close to the truth, whatever that may be.
Eh, surely snapchat can prevent it?
Personally, I think the most likely scenario is a little of both. Policies existed, but management would obviously have stepped in if they were alerted, but someone used the policies for personal gain within the company by quoting them and figured they could fall back on them if called out on it by management. If that's the case, the bad PR this may result in may mean that protection is moot. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Saliterman's actions may have been poorly thought out, and traded a small short-term company (and personal) gain for a much greater longer-term risk (which we might be seeing now).
[1] http://corporate.findlaw.com/law-library/i-have-a-great-comm...
Maybe you should visit their site: http://everytown.org/who-we-are/
That's my only point. There's no way to abstain and keep the goodwill of everyone.
Is it not unlike Microsoft donating product as sponsorship? (e.g., $100k non-profit sponsorship turns out to be in-kind provision of MS Office licenses.) That's often viewed critically by many on HN.
Running an ad from Glock during the event -- now that would problably be a bit ridiculous.
NRA has an interest in everyone being able to have guns. Politically they "have to" align to gun safety, because who doesn't like "safety"?
They're not a group that has an interest in "safety above all", because that wouldn't include guns.
Their priorities are:
1) Guns.
2) Safety, as long as it doesn't infringe on 1).
NRA membership is large enough that they also conform to similar values as the general public.
As such, they also want weapons to be as safe as possible, while still remaining effective weapons.
An anti-gun member of the public doesn't want guns to be 'weapons', they want them to be 'hobby tools' which would allow you to compromise effectiveness to an extreme just to get safety.
To me the anti-gun lobby is disingenuous by framing gun ownership as a "hobby". Why in the world would there be a constitutional amendment about a hobby? This is like writing a constitution where the 2nd line talks about the rights to own basketballs.
But I guess it's the same with religion, and that's global.
1. Snapchat tries to advise Everytown that ad slots are open and the NRA is likely to capture some of them
2. Everytown can't afford to buy up all the slots at the quoted price
(So far, I think both Everytown and Snapchat are still ok here. No harm done.)
3. Snapchat representative, Saliterman, ends the running email conversation with an email saying this: "To be clear, the story has the potential to be bought by any advertiser, including the NRA, which will enable the advertiser to run three 10-sec video ads within the story."
(At this point, if I were in Everytown's shoes, I would now fully believe Snapchat was acting against my interests. They're not even trying to work with me any more.)
Why didn't Everytown call Snapchat's bluff? Run the campaign, not buy the ad slots, let Snapchat do what they may.
They could have screen-grabbed the resulting campaign and used it to generate _massive_ publicity.
Snapchat would have had huge egg on their face.
I can think of Everytown not wanting to make a spectacle of the families who had suffered such loss. But with advance notice maybe they could have gone to the families and asked politely? It seems likely some would have agreed to let this happen and then fight the NRA on the outcome.
(If I were the NRA, as well, I would be _furious_ at Snapchat for ill-using my ad spend in this way.)
But it's all hypothetical, apparently.
Several years ago, I became embroiled in a local controversy. A journalist reached out to me via Facebook messages. As she was not one of my friends, the message went into the abyss. When the story hit her publication it contained the same "Greg Hluska did not respond to a request for comment."
Maybe there shouldn't be ad space in these types of campaigns, but if they have do have ad slots, anyone can buy them, and I can totally see the NRA doing that.
That doesn't make any sense. The only reason "anyone" can buy the ads is that Snapchat is letting them.
They have a whole page covering the limitations and what types of things aren't allowed: https://www.snap.com/en-US/ad-policies/
It's their company and they can decline to take ads if they would serve the company interest. This guy put the ad division's interest ahead of the company and hurt Snapchat's reputation in the process.
Also his phrasing was "we are talking with the NRA" whereas it would probably have been more explicitly "the NRA has approached us" if they were merely reacting. And again the reaction could simply be "no".
Why is it against the company interest? Because the ad division could literally target every political story the news division puts out as a target for competitive ads, thus forcing content partners to pay up lest they create a platform for their opponents. Thus most would pull out of the stories (as Everytown did) and ultimately decline to cooperate with Snapchat news at all. Sounds like this guy was sabotaging the story out of spite.
I already noted below that I believe this to be the most likely scenario, except it's also in Snapchat's short-term interest, which is why he probably got away with it, at least until now.
That said, the quotes are fairly sparse, and possibly out of context, so I'm hesitant to attribute too much intent to how they are presented in this article.
The practice is often metaphorically referred to as "church and state".
Were I the NRA, I would definitely pay a lot more, have better conversion rates, and have happier ad viewers if I could target ads at Snapchat users who talk about guns.
The ad department isn't supposed to influence how things are covered, but they very commonly know what's coming up precisely for this reason, to find advertisers who want to run adjacent ads.
So that part is normal. But sabatoging the subject of editorial with ad content is definitely not normal, and this ad rep's behavior would be totally out of line at any traditional media outlet for that reason.
If they can increase their IPO value with ad sales, they'll be doing so. 40% market penetration for youngsters is solid.
This conversation is the email equivalent of "Hey, this is a really nice shop you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it. I'm not saying that anything is going to happen to it, but if you pay me some money, I'll do what I can to ensure nothing happens". It's just missing the pinstripe suit and the accent.
Here's the thing: it doesn't matter that Snapchat's internal divisions are at odds. 'Snapchat' was proactively working with a client and had organised a fee waiver, and then 'Snapchat' demanded blood money. Internal politics are Snapchat's problem, not their clients'. Letting them off the hook on this one merely gives them leeway for their broken internal promises.
This is all independent of the actual moral issues. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, but I'd be just as disgusted if Snapchat had organised to do an editorial with a Christian group, then "what a nice shop"'d them saying 'a hostile atheist group could buy ads'.
Sure, that's definitely how it was presented. I'm just saying that we've been given a story, and very little to back it up. I'm not sure where these emails are they are referring to, and if it's possible to corroborate the story, but I think it's worth noting how little sources were cited, and how we got snippets of sentences, not even a single full email. Neither Snapchat nor Everytown are on record in the article either. Do I believe there's some truth to the story? Yes, and my other comments go into detail on that, but I don't think we should be immediately believing everything presented here without corroboration of some sort, just because it fits our current worldview.
I'm also not sure what kind of context would cast opening with 'we are also talking to the NRA about running ads within the story' in a good light. That's presented as a direct quote, not an inference.
If tech.mic is inventing things out of whole cloth here, then Snapchat has grounds for a libel suit.
I don't think that's a good characterization of my position.
> I'm also not sure what kind of context would cast opening with 'we are also talking to the NRA about running ads within the story' in a good light. That's presented as a direct quote, not an inference.
And quotes have never been presented out of context before? All I'm saying is that in a story where both sides have not released any sort of statement clarifying the situation or their position, and there are just emails to go by, I would feel more comfortable if I was able to see the full email when presented with the scenario in question, rather than quotes taken out of the email and presented in the narrative of the article.
> If tech.mic is inventing things out of whole cloth here, then Snapchat has grounds for a libel suit.
That's not the only option though. It could very well be a fairly ambiguous chain of emails, and rational people might disagree on how to interpret them. I don't like having that chance denied me, nor being told how to interpret the situation through limited releases of information.
Edit: See https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/01/leaked-emails-put-spotligh... for Snapchat's statement. It's along the lines of what I figured it would be in my first comment, but that's an obvious way to reply whether true or not, and as I noted, at this point it's all in the hands of Pr departments.
It's just an implication.
If you work at Amazon and want to show Amazon ads at the top of the page, whenever a user searches for eBay, Google will happily let Amazon do that. If eBay wants to prevent it, they need to pay money go secure the advertising spot on "eBay" search results. Ditto for Windows/Mac, BMW/Mercedes, etc etc.
At its foundation, advertising spots are content-agnostic. Anyone is able to buy advertising slots on any page, and as long as everyone follows the rules, whoever has the best bid*click-through-rate will win. And to be honest, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to run a business that's funded almost entirely by advertising revenues.
Overly simplistic example: eBay bids $1 max and Amazon bids $2 max. People searching for eBay have a 10% probability of clicking on an eBay ad and a 2% probability of clicking on an Amazon ad.
Expected value to google: Ebay - $1 * 10% = $0.10 EV max Amazon - $2 * 2% = $0.04 EV max
Ebay is displayed even with a lower bid because the expected value of the display is higher. The bid is never adjusted -- eBay is specific about its bid or its maximum bid and the market of expected value decides who is shown. Amazon could just as easily bid $5.01 and show up. And when the ad is clicked, if Amazon is the only bidder at $2, then Ebay would pay $.50 for that click because that is the lowest bid that wins the position using the EV.
To apply this to the Snapchat Conversation -- One might expect if Snapchat operated this way, then its probably fair to assume that EveryTown would have had a much higher relevancy score than NRA, so should have been able to win the campaign for much lower $$. But in paid placement like this, everyone is paying for placement not for performance. It is not an EV market. Hence the dilemma.
Also this does not apply to snapchat, because afaik they do brand advertising based on impressions (CPM) and not clicks (CPC).
This is not competing retailers, it's people fighting over matters of life and death and they will use any tactic against each other no matter how distasteful because they believe the end justifies the means.
Clearly any media company has to carefully weigh controversial issues from different perspectives. Making money, preserving the integrity and their brand, potential bad press or defecting customers, etc.
Often there is no simple rule. A judgement call has to be made factoring in what's best for company overall and if we're lucky maybe integrity is mentioned by someone along the way.
I'm pro-gun, and have given money to the NRA, and I'd be upset if snapchat wouldn't sell ad-space to the Brady Campaign during an NRA-sponsored event like if the 1000-person shoot had been captured using Snapchat.
I think it's a basic moral standing that whenever someone is saying something I want it allowed for the oposition to say the exact opposite.
I also think that the only people who'd be afraid of a pro-NRA ad in or during an anti-gun ad would be those who cannot defend their moral possition.
Personally, I'm happy when I get the opprotunity to see the anti-gun arguments on HN and that we can discuss ideas about these subjects. It broadens my understanding of what others think and vise versa.
There isn't a problem with saying "I sell X, and all I care about is the money I get from doing that" and then turning around and selling Xs to the highest bidder.
Their audience demographics would probably hate to see an NRA ad in a story about gun control, and it would hurt Snapchat's reputation, brand, and loyalty. You might even see hashtags trending about it, calling them "insensitive" and worse.
It would definetly be in Snapchat's interests. The best thing for an arms dealer is a war, the best thing for a place of discussion is a clash of ideology.
They'd just sell the space to both sides, run the ads, say "We are a neutral party who doesn't get involved in politics; if we give one side a stand we're fine with giving the other side a stand. Complain to the NRA if you think it's poor taste, we just sell bilboard space"
> Their audience demographics would probably hate to see an NRA ad in a story about gun control, and it would hurt Snapchat's reputation, brand, and loyalty
Sadly, a lot of pro 2a people use Snapchat despite my, and many others, protestings.
Also, we need to ask a few questions about this "brand loyalty" and "repuation". What "reputation" does Snapchat have? What "brand" does Snapchat have? Their a service to send small clips of your life to other people. Wheather that's to send videos of you speeding at >100MPH, of crying people talking about how guns killed their relatives, or the NRA saying that it wasn't the guns but instead was a criminal who killed their relative.
That perception of their essential function is not damaged and in fact, if anything, a lot of pro-gun people would just be happy that their willing to be unbias in their ad-space.
> You might even see hashtags trending about it, calling them "insensitive" and worse.
I'd surely hope the anti-gun crowd can come up with a worse insult then "insensitive". Even still, I've never seen something come of the hash-tag-nag that happens after every major screw-up of a company. The demographics we're talking about come from a time when voting with your wallet isn't even a faint idea in the back of their head.
If Snapchat came out pro-Hitler, financially supporting neo-Nazis, I'd bet good money that after the initial hash-tag-nag craze the same crowd would still use the app.
The fact is that Snapchat has poised itself as a key piece of the communication networks that the younger generations are forming. It would need a suitible replacement for them to think about leaving it.
That's why it's an advertisers gold mine. All you have to do is keep the market clean and you'll be able to reach this century's bread-and-butter demographic.
I have snapchat installed on my phone. I do not use it. I do not like the company. I'm not in their demographic. I don't like taking pictures of myself nor of my suroundings.
I'm about as much of a use as I am Verizon Messanger+ user. It's there on my phone, I'll never use it, and I don't like it.
The extent of my usage of the app pretty much goes to telling people who message me on it to text me instead.
Do you think it would be acceptable for the webmaster of Mercedes to put BMW ads on their site, because BMW was willing to pay them to do so?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/208...
An intelligent brand manager has to weigh the positives and negatives of paid and earned media. In this case, in light of Saliterman's email, a brand manager would weigh the (seemingly high) possibility that the NRA would advertise alongside fearful messages from grieving families. Since Everytown knew that this was a possibility, the advertising alongside the editorial had the capacity to damage the brand and (perhaps more importantly) cost jobs.
If the complaints would be different, then it's just your political bias. Some people think the NRA is important and its message is being harmed by groups like Everytown. In that case, why not focus on the heart of the issue which is "Snapchat allows NRA ads but I don't like guns".
pre-emptive edit in case someone finds some place where this isn't true: I mean generally. They are not a gun manufacturer or seller generally.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-gun-re...
Take environmental sciences for example, the CRU and other leaks where scientist where exposed colluding with other scientist to blackball legitimate skeptics tainted the whole industry. Now we are seeing an wholesale rejection of environmental sciences and the gutting of the EPA. In a manner this is good, because there was obvious collusion and political advocacy and intent to stifle real science. On the other had, we also got a wholesale rejection by the voting majority which is now set to put clean energy back decades.
I personally put the blame squarely on the scientist of the CRU and the NOAA pause buster scientists (they are a disgrace to the title). They cost us dearly by trying to advance their agenda. When you compromise the integrity of science the cost is just too great.
I have no problem with science taking that approach. At least it keeps it fairly pure.
Science isn't about making feel comfortable, it's about following the scientific method. It often presents ugly or inconvenient truths.
I think it's bad enough if one researcher says that they and their entire team ("we're") are committed to corrupting the results of the study to reach a foregone conclusion.
The state does not like citizens having guns, the state owns and operates the CDC and decides its budget and staffing. In a way, the research is about matters which the state has a vested interest in. If this were a private company, we would be ready to write it off entirely.
Certainly the scientific community is prone to coming to broader conclusions than the findings suggest, but every scientific paper's discussion section can be prone to this. And, that isn't where the conversation ends, as follow-on research will often pick apart those conclusions.
Meanwhile, the NRA has effectively bullied the CDC into not doing any research at all related to guns, as you can tell from how they respond to the NRA:
> Following the January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Ariz., (in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was injured), the New York Times published an article reporting that the CDC went so far as to “ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the NRA as a courtesy.” In response to this report, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence sent a letter (PDF, 647) in March 2011 to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius expressing concern that the agency was giving the NRA a “preferred position,” and urging that the NRA not be given the opportunity to exercise special influence over CDC’s firearms-related research.
> In December 2011, Congress added language equivalent to the Dickey amendment to fiscal year 2012 appropriations legislation that funded the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012 (PDF, 1.3MB), stating that “none of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” The NRA’s advocacy efforts that lead to this amendment are thought to be a response to a 2009 American Journal of Public Health article by Branas et al., titled “Investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault,” presenting the results of research that was funded by the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. [1]
In what other domain do we tip toe around research like this?
I think its pretty clear the NRA is simply afraid of the implications of such research - the hard question that comes up when liberties and their societal costs intersect. Maybe we choose liberties, but we have to go into that conversation with our eyes open.
[1] http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.as...
they should all be called out for acting anti-science.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/31/cdc-researc...
It's only an industry advocacy group in the sense that there is an industry that happens to have goals that align with the people who fund it.
That's not an industry advocacy group, in the same way the various brady groups are not industry advocacy groups simply because there is an industry (trigger-locks, non-lethal weaponry, etc) that happens to have goals that align with the people who fund that.
Nevertheless, I don't think its as simple as goals happening to align with industry, nor do I see equivalence in the industry relationships to brady groups (though admittedly I haven't researched that).
Given the NRA's closely held governance structure and the large individual donations from manufacturers, one does not need a great deal of money (and certainly not majority of $) to influence direction toward industry ends that may not be in the interest of individual members as much as industry members and NRA leadership. That's honestly the best kind of influence to have, as your goals appear to be those of the large passionate group of individuals.
I agree though 'more or less' overstates that relationship, I was wrong. I'll amend that to: the industry has influence over the policies the NRA advocates for, and benefits from those policies appearing to come from their large member base.
FWIW I'm not opposed to the NRA per se, in fact a group for teaching responsible gun use is great. I'm just opposed to the current incarnation of the organization.
Honestly: It's just that companies tend to donate more to individuals. That seems normal.
"I agree though 'more or less' overstates that relationship, I was wrong. I'll amend that to: the industry has influence over the policies the NRA advocates for, and benefits from those policies appearing to come from their large member base. " I think you have the arrow of causation backwards. How do you now know that it isn't "NRA individual members want to make sure industry does not get screwed, so NRA works with industry to formulate policies that help the industries, to help their members" ?
Cause otherwise, i could argue the same thing about the brady groups. "The non-lethal weapon industry has influence over the policies the various brady groups advocate, and benefits from those policies appearing to come from their large member base"
(substitute non-lethal-weapons from any of a number of industries that benefit here. there are plenty on both sides of this coin :P)
I believe, without evidence otherwise, that the arrow of causation is "members want industry to survive and thrive, so mother org works with industry policy wise".
Note that your arrow of causation is applicable to roughly any major org.
IE industry donates heavily to EFF, in large amounts (though not, AFAIK, larger than user base, much like the NRA). Therefore "industry has influence over the policies EFF advocates for, and benefits from those policies appearing to come from their large member base".
(as you can see, this argument line can be applied to any association accepting corporate contribution :P)
If you make or sponsor a gun control bill, the NRA will tell every member in your district to vote you out of office... and they will. This means that the only legislators who can safely support such legislation are those who are completely entrenched. Everyone else makes slight nods of approval at the Diane Feinsteins while refraining from committing totally; they can't afford to piss off thousands of very reliable, very energetic voters.
Though I disagree that there is no relationship, see other comment above.
But is anyone thinking it? I can say in reference some people I don't like, 'I disagree with the people who like to kick puppies'.
Part of my objection is that throwing unfounded allegations around is at the core, IMHO, of the propaganda that seems to rule public discourse currently. It's easy to make them, it takes far more time to refute them - and then the attacker makes another one.
If that was all there was to it, I would agree.
However, that's missing the huge asymmetry at play here: money. Specifically, the NRA is an industry-funded group that has lots of it, and the people who's family members have been victims of gun violence don't.
If this was a spat between, say, Google and Oracle, each of which has boatloads of money to buy the competitor's advertising spots, no one would care.
But this story feels scummy because it's a human story, one where the little guy is fighting a noble cause but is being shaken down by organizations who write weekly checks larger than some of these people will see in their lifetime.
If you pretend that money doesn't create an asymmetry, then yes, you being upset this way but not the other is all relative.
Is it really? It seems to me that there is a lot of reason to believe that the NRA is funded primarily through membership fees and individual contributions.
https://www.quora.com/Where-does-funding-for-the-National-Ri...
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of the NRA, and probably ever other pro-gun advocacy group you've ever heard of, and some you haven't.
It's really really not. There are plenty of groups that fall into that category, the NRA is not one of them.
The fact that you are just kind of saying this blindly, without any data to back it up, when even trivial searches would tell you it's wrong, severely dilutes any argument you have.
(note, i actually am very anti-gun, but i try to at least research the assertions i'm going to make)
That's just not true at all:
https://www.quora.com/Where-does-funding-for-the-National-Ri...
(edit: bah, in the time verifying my sources, three other people posted the same info :) )
The NRA is a member-funded group. Five million members paying annual dues -- that's where their money comes from.[1] They use some of this to fund gun safety education and training (Everytown For Gun Safety does not, oddly enough). Sure, industry chips in, but it's just a couple million $ (which is tiny compared to member dues).
[1] https://www.quora.com/Where-does-funding-for-the-National-Ri... (graphs data from NRA's public tax filings)
Pro-gun ads are great but if they appear right after a haunting piece about a child killed through gun violence they are disgusting unless they are very, very tactful (which I have never seen from ANY ad). They shouldn't be placed there because it's offensive (and it does no favor to the pro-gun cause). I think that's on snap chat to avoid those instances always.
You could say hyper-emotional appeals about the victims shouldn't be done, and I'd agree with you, but they are done, so tact is important.
I do NOT want to (or intend to) get into a gun control debate -- my point is that there a many ways to parse these things.
When discussing the Boston Marathon bombing no advocacy groups were demanding a ban on pressure cookers. In France after the Nice attack, nobody was advocating for stricter truck licensing requirements or enhanced background checks on commercial truck renters/puchasers.
My second point is that agenda groups hijack tragedy to achieve their own ends. As Obama's advisor Rahm Emanuel said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." In the context of a story, its editorial malfeasance to prevent all sides of a story from being expressed.
A reasonable analogy would be ads cheerleading nuclear power after a nuclear power plant explosion killed thousands and permanently ruined a region of a country. And an ad just played that tried to garner sympathy for the children of women effected by the nuclear blast.
A reasonable analogy would be additional regulations on airplanes after they killed thousands of people in a terrorist attack.
As far as I can tell the only reason you view his analogies as inappropriate is they don't support the conclusion you want to draw.
Also I would like to point out that accses/ownership to pressure cookers, trucks, nuclear power, and air-travel are not constitutional protected whereas gun ownership very explicitly is. I am all for talking about removing/modifying the 2nd amendment through the constitutional amedment process I just not for pretending like it's not there .
Now, how someone got to his professional level without knowing how to handle this conversation more tactfully is beyond me. And further if he was trying to convince them this was a possibility when it _wasn't_, or some other nefarious ploy then sure - let's jump on the outrage bandwagon, but from that article? Nothing to see here.
when an ad causes serious consternation in the press, they pull it because "we've a private site and can regulate speech".
But if there isn't sufficient controversy, they can hide behind the banner of free speech.
Sites like Facebook need to either commit to allowing all lawful ads, or admit they exercise editorial judgement on what is "proper" speech, and start a larger conversation about what sort of speech should be restricted.
Facebook does exactly that, with slightly different rules for posts & comments and with ads.
I'd guess these are similarly interesting times in the SnapChat ad sales department on the way to an IPO - they are under tremendous pressure to drive results.
Editorial staff would reply, "Okay, in that situation, it might be okay. But what happens if we want to run a well researched/sourced story that is highly critical of one of our biggest advertisers?"
Their fear would be that if there is too much communication between advertising and editorial, advertising would use its control over revenue to hurt editorial independence. And, then ad sales people tend to reply, "Well, if you won't give us the chance to kill a story, it is better if we don't even know about it. That way, when the person who I have sold ads to calls me up yelling, I can truthfully say that I didn't know because there is a wall between advertising and editorial."
In other words, the wall between advertising and editorial mostly sucks for both sides, but it's better than any alternative. It preserves editorial independence while giving sales people the chance to save relationships (in anticipation of their next job).
It looks to me that most people on here work for startups and new companies and some how want to work in a field that has higher morals and ethics. Why would a sales guy try to behave differently and not make a sale? We have seen this again and again with other sales teams from Yelp and others. I am not trying to explain the actions of sales people just to understand where the outrage is coming from.
People expect ethics and morals from people. Startups are run by people.
People don't expect ethics and morals from all people or organizations in the same amount.
Orgs are made of people. I prefer to interact with ethical people over unethical people. Don't see what's difficult about that.
Running with a pack may embolden people to act unethically, but if anything, that's more reason to shun bad actors.
Not true, many people expect that and criticize them if they fail to meet this standard.
I agree with your sentiment. That said, would you expect ethics and morals from a CEO that organized a Sally Hemings[1]-Thomas Jefferson party? Would you expect ethics and morals from a CEO that used to joke about urinating on women? Which is why I would avoid interaction with that startup.
[1] Sally Hemings was the 14 year old black slave girl that the 44 year old Thomas Jefferson had 6 kids with.
[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/fuck-bitches-get-leid-the-sleazy...
[3] http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/6_leaked_emails_that_ruined_...
I think this depends on what you mean by 'expect'. If we believe that they will act morally at the expense of their own interests, that is probably naive in most cases. But if we 'expect' them to act morally in the sense that we hold them to a certain ethical standard, and get upset if they don't live up to it, then the expectation can to some extent be self-fulfilling: if bad behaviour will hurt their reputation, they have to take that into account when making a decision, and in some cases that will cause the right thing and the self-interested thing to converge.
Just to be clear, if roles were reversed and the NRA advertised you would _not_ want Everytown to have ad placement as a rebuttal or do you just find it gross because you disagree at a political/personal level?
That goes both ways.
If I post an video on Youtube for my spaghetti event. And it has reach, then of course other spaghetti vendors may want to run ads on it if they pay up.
Slow news day?
(as an aside, Everytown for Gun Safety is not actually a gun-safety charity: it's an anti-gun organisation)
Everytown's budget for political contributions last year was about 1/3 of the NRAs, but the the overall organization budgets are vast different - Wikipedia shows the NRA having $348m in revenue in 2013, while Everytown brought in $4.9m in 2012.
From a purely financial perspective, Snap should be prioritizing the NRA's business over Everytown's.
Technically it's not a subscription, it's a donation. And technically they do make money with underwriting but I think user contributions make up the vast majority of their funding.
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, major PBS programming was funded by oil companies (Mobil in particular, if you watched Masterpiece Theater). Today, Nova receives heavy funding from Koch sources. Even nonprofit sources are tainted -- the John Templeton Foundation (look it up) has a very specific agenda, and there is/was a two-part series, "The Real Adam Smith", which was essentially a straight-up, full-on propaganda piece put out by the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network, funded by Templeton, and with Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW's name specifically attached to the production. The content is highly slanted, and I found (and find) the whole matter exceedingly questionable.
I'm not saying there isn't a lot of good work coming through PBS, NPR, PRX, and similar sources. Or that the quality isn't, generally, vastly superior to commercial media. But that bar is set miles below floor level, and the problems with co-option of public media have been increasing with time.
Part of that I attribute to "Woozle's Epistemic Paradox": because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
A problem which attaches to other (really, any) media, including online: BBSes, Usenet, Geocities, Facebook, Reddit, HN.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
Apart from the highly dubious ethics being exhibited, it suggests it's a surprisingly unsophisticated organisation.
Everytown for Gun Safety is a private lobbying effort funded by Michael Bloomberg, and believes that they can use a company's service for free while censoring paid ads from a true community charitable organization which is funded primarily by membership dues. Mic deliberately characterizes Everytown for Gun Safety as a "gun safety charity", and avoids using similar language to describe NRA, a registered charitable organization with a considerable number of members. Are they trying to say that the NRA doesn't care about gun safety?
I don't really see why Snap Inc. should have to promote Michael Bloomberg's fantasies for no pay, and prevent the voice of an established charitable institution from being included alongside it through the standard advertising process.
IPO will increases the exit valuation when Snapchat inevitably fizzles and gets bought out by a tech giant with actual positive net profit.
There's no reason that Snapchat should voluntarily censor ads on that story at their own financial loss.
Like, if a LGBT organization wanted to give a television network the rights to air an Orlando Shooting documentary on the condition that they don't sell ads for conversion therapy in the middle, that's kind of their right to make that sort of offer. It's a very short distance from making those demands to the distribution side preemptively seeking out those sorts of deals.
The bigger picture, that's why. Not tomorrow's quarterly results.
In any case, the issue isn't political activism, it's the tastelessness of the threat. It also doesn't help that it exposes how this particular employee apparently felt no compunction in undermining what others in his business were working for - it sure looks like he wasn't actually handling in the best interests of his employer, and I can't imagine he didn't know it.
I'm not saying we should applaud this development...
In any case, I don't see no evidence that snapchat it being particularly biased based on one story they're pushing. It's pretty much impossible to make that conclusion based on one story, given that they push so many. It looks more like sheer incompetence to me than anything else.
If Snapchat's board are all in agreement that that's where they want the money to go, fine --- but they should also realize that Snapchat is a social network, and the appearance of fairness is probably a reasonable thing to aim at. If the DNC or RNC launched a social network, they would find themselves somewhat hampered in their ability to grow, and with good reason.
Alternatively, do you think "everything is normal, continue doing consumer culture stuff" somehow isn't a political message?
Most people can decide whether to "continue doing consumer culture stuff" or to freak out about politics without the help of Snap or any other corporation. There's an odd sort of corporate worship/megalomania that makes people think they're morally obligated to "weigh in" on an issue. They're not, and their constituent individuals are more than capable of pursuing their own political activism and/or creating more appropriate vehicles for voluntary cooperation toward those ends.
"Snapchat? Do they accept advertising?" would be quite illuminating as to the situation at hand.
The NRA is either a bogeyman posited by Snapchat as a hook for the hard sell, or they're an unwitting co-conspirator, or they're just a buzzword to grease the skids on this article. It would be informative to know which, and if the news is supposed to inform, then I can't see how there's any harm in reaching out.
If I saw an Exxon Mobile commercial during a climate change documentary, I would take that as tacit support of the subject.
Now, obviously I'm wrong. So can someone explain why this advertising is so valuable to the NRA? I guess it's just trolling.
As far as I can tell, the NRA isn't even involved here.
> We are also talking to the NRA about running ads within the story.
Later in the article it says that the NRA advertised on Snapchat in 2015, have they since? Or was it that now we will contacting the NRA to tell them it's a good idea to advertise during your editorial.
Seeing the comments it looks like the majority doesn't see a problem with this because the NRA is free to do advertising. To me it's just bad business to be featuring a good cause as a so-called partner and then extorting them like this. It certainly also seems like that would be a negative experience for the viewers and the partner.
In the end Snapchat lost both an editorial partner with a group that resonates with their target demographics and any potential advertising revenue from the event.
This was absolutely an unprofessional move and not simple targeted selling. The story would not have been as attractive a target for the NRA without Everytown's cooperation in the first place. So now that Snapchat's roped them in, to maintain the integrity of their story they need to pay up? This guy put his division ahead of Snapchat's reputation as a company.
[1] http://www.potomacflacks.com/pf/2011/09/former-bush-spokesma...
In fact the anti gun lobby should tell their members to click on all these ads (or get a 'clickbot to do it) since that will burn gun company cash for zero gains
Snapchat has no obligation to favour one side of the gun reform debate over the other. But the way this article frames it, they're actively blackmailing the gun-reform side.
It's likely more accurate to say they didn't want to afford the $150k.
Oddly the "threat" is essentially that you might become ritually unclean by proximity to such content.
>Obama has been the best gun salesman for the United States ever.
Because of all the extremist gun control legislation he passed?
No, wait.. people just believed Obama was coming for their guns but he never actually did that.
It's almost as if people have been trained to respond to gun violence by supporting the NRA and buying guns ... in some sort of Pavlovian response.
But I can't imagine what organization or industry could possibly have spent decades and millions of dollars in political capital engineering such a virtuous cycle for themselves.
I still don't know why the political process working as intended justifies the degree of paranoia that leads to mass stockpiling of guns and ammunition, though. Or why that paranoia manifests behind all gun control legislation, not just the "draconian" attempts which fail.
I don't see evidence of the "draconian" bills you mentioned, or of nefarious intent by "Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and other ilk."
The first two don't seem draconian to me, they seem reasonably targeted to address specific concerns. The bills listed appear to provide exceptions for weapons owned before the bill would take effect, for law enforcement, etc. I don't see the typical doomsday scenario of wholesale banning, mass confiscation or disarmament that we're told the democrats are always working towards. Maybe I need to read between the lines?
The third is disturbing because of the no-fly list, not the ban itself. Felons are already banned from owning firearms as a class, and no one would argue that terrorists or criminals should have guns, so the premise of banning firearms in some cases seems acceptable even to many gun advocates. The no-fly list wasn't created by Democrats, but it was expanded in scope and overwhelmingly supported by Republicans, so I can't really consider that part to be a Democrat issue per se - blame the Democrats for the ban, but blame the Republicans for the blacklist that makes the ban unacceptable.
If gun legislation is, as stated earlier by jonnycoder, "using a shooting event to blame guns and call for bans and stricter gun control," then the typical response by gun advocates amounts to "using a shooting event to promote guns and call for higher gun sales." Why can gun advocates criticize the former, but not the latter?
There was other legislation and regulation; .50 caliber ban, steel core ammo ban, mail order ammo ban, import ban of Korean War surplus rifles, import ban of Russian guns.
Though I agree with you about Republicans; they can support gun control too.
Such a crazy cognitive dissonance. What about your right to have a bomb? Or a biological weapon?
Such an actively harmful hill to die on.
US courts have tried to get around this by finding a right to self defense, and finding that preventing someone from carrying a handgun infringes this right, but preventing them from carrying a missile does not. However this makes no sense: if someone points a gun at you then its already too late to pull your own gun out and shoot them, so guns are only useful for self defense against criminals who don't have guns.
Its true that there are some extremely narrow circumstances in which a legal gun carried by a bystander can be used to stop a gun crime, but only in a tiny fraction of cases.
Unless that's disingenuous of what they actually "brag" about. Are they just bragging about having freedom to protect themselves? Freedom to own an inanimate object?
There are two legal entities:
1. Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, Inc; a 501(c)3
2. Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, Inc; a 501(c)4
The NRA is structured similarly with the NRA being the traditional non-profit and the NRA-ILA being the political lobbying entity.
It's disingenuous to cast one group as a charity and not the other.
But even if the roles were reversed (threatening anti-gun violence ads on an NRA piece), what that sales rep did would have been nasty to both his client and to his colleagues. But hey, I'm sure the PR department can use the extra work.