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Comment by lsh | Hacker News Reader

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I remember I read a news article once about a man who battered his girlfriend to death with an iPod for messing with his playlist. The article had embedded advertisements to buy iPods.

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These kind of 'keyword' based ads can backfire quick. Every forum where people seek support for miscariages will have all the keywords expected for sites visited by expecting or new parents. There are thousands of quite opposite cases where humans would judge the subjects very different than a bot counting keywords.

It's really hard to get this right.

> There are thousands of quite opposite cases where humans would judge the subjects very different than a bot counting keywords.

It doesn't stop people from publishing results based on cutting-edge automated sentiment analysis, though. It's amazing what people will believe if you just lie loudly enough.

or footage of tragic events being played after some overly enthusiastic video ad. thank god for ublock origin on Firefox everywhere.

I recommend going a step further and configuring yourself a PiHole server. It can be done with the cheapest raspberry pi available (wireless for convenience).

The satirical magazine "Private Eye" collects these as "Malgorithmns - A feature dedicated to excellence in online advertising" and they're usually much as you described. The software has spotted a mention of idea A, but doesn't grok that the context makes this a bad time to advertise X even though A and X are associated in some way.

They also, as fair play, put in some examples from offline (physical newspaper) advertising.

It seems so easy to avoid, too. Just add a "Somber Mood" checkbox to your CMS when publishing, and swap it to "Help us continue to provide important journalism..."

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