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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

If there's anyone out there who wants to earn money from advertising there are two words you need to be aware of:

"BRAND SAFETY"

No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. This is why YouTube is demonetising any video that mentions Covid-19. YouTube themselves technically probably don't care, but brand safety conscious advertisers certainly do, and so YouTube must too.

They've realised that Twitter and FB, and others, are currently toxic platforms. The discussion threads can be awful, driven by fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate. They no longer want to buy this advertising space, it's too much of a reputational risk (I will say that advertisers outsource the buying of advertising space to Ad agencies who may not be as savvy since they're under pressure to spend allotted advertising budgets).

Hence the news about big brands pulling budgets from social media.

Another issue that I've never seen discussed is that if Twitter (and other social media platforms) relies completely on advertising revenue, it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of. In other words, advertisers can in theory control political debate. Social media platforms then ban or remove content that's undesirable for advertisers because they can't monetise it.

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> it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of

This was already the case before social media, mainstream media has always been controlled by the powerful. By "the powerful", I don't mean a secret cabal of white men deciding what happens, but that only people with enough resources, right connections can have an influence over what gets published. This is a pretty small group and not representative of the general public.

Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control. I think they're going to succeed, and we'll go back to a higher barrier of entry in terms of influencing public opinions, which can be both a good and bad thing.

> Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control.

That's not really the case, as can been seen by the hate given to both FB and Twitter on HN.

HN is largely populated with the 1%.

Perhaps, in the financial sense.

But that's very different to the people who are typically refereed to as "the elites". That typically includes - for example - journalists - who aren't well paid at all.

Journalists aren't the elite. They're the PR people working for the elite.

These generalizations and plattitudes are off the mark and dangerous. Sure, there are those working as PR for the elite, or they are honest journalists that work for MSM that is in the hands of the elites. Most journalists, especially investigative journalists want to do their job as well as they can, in an environment that is increasingly hostile to good journalism. We need these people to help keep our democracy intact.

Using elite as a term of derision is rather silly anyway. Who else would you want running the country than the most skilled and accomplished?

People who have my interests in mind.

I think you'll be waiting a long time for that. The most I hope for is that politicians interests might align with mine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

I want a country where the median person is educated and grounded enough to make good choices about their community.

This might not be possible. (“Myth of egalitarianism”)

I think the whole "elites" terminology is silly.

As a very broad generalisation it seems to mean "people who are richer or have a bigger voice than me who I disagree with.

I doubt that is true. SV crowd may be loud but they aren't the majority on HN.

Here's how I would group HN based on income, what keywords make them click and demography.

1. Old system admins, FOSS lovers, and retired due to age folks.

Around median income.

Keywords - vim, Emacs, firefox, awk, unions, inequality, privacy, new tech bad, linux, open source projects, go, haiku, history, and against-big-tech.

2. Fresh college graduate/ enrolled in CS or equivalents, teenagers, hermits, and recently laid off.

Below median income or none.

Keywords - education, degrees, FAANGs, interviews, privacy, income inequality, against-the-popular-social-media, against-google-apple, firefox, chrome, free-speech, thought-crime, and twittter.

3. SV crowd, founders, and employees of a big company.

Above median income.

Keywords - rent, homelessness, parenting, investment, CA, economics, happiness, open source but the profitable or commerical kind (kubernetes tool, cockroachdb, materialize), startups, climate change, big-company-profit-loss, apple, security and immigration.

4. Researchers and retired by choice.

Above Median or low/no income.

Passive consumers so they click on wide variety of keywords. Occasionally, participate in something related to their field.

5. Long time active HN members.

Above median or median income.

They click on most posts on the front page but comment in their own silos or interests. They help direct the site by filtering from new or stopping hoard of initial comments.

6. Marketers, sales and non-tech crowd.

Median or lower median income.

Keywords - medium article, heres-why, how-I, growth, crypto, ads, effective-ways-to, and the likes.

This is only my observation so it will be biased and wrong but I definitely don't think hners are 1%.

I like how all of these groups have some reason to oppose big-tech and social media. It's like the one thing we can all agree on here at HN.

I don't agree with either of these things.

Median by what bar? Global, Silicon Valley, relative to their local area?

Relative to the local area.

I feel like you omitted an obvious category; devs who don't work in SV

I didn't single it out to SV. But yes, I did omit a huge portion of devs. I couldn't find any patterns. A dev living in [country] will talk in threads about their [country]. Such details are obvious. But SV crowd talk about rent details of other countries or states which is a trend.

> if... it can be forced to allow only content that advertisers approve of.

Your comment seems to state explicitly that not only can they be forced to, but they actively are, and already have been for a while.

However, this fits with my intuition (especially in the now-advertiser-driven “news” space), so I may be jumping to conclusions.

> No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic.

That's pre-historic thinking. No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before.

The dinosaurs will die out. They'll be replaced by social-media-savy advertisers.

That may be true at some point in the future, but I believe we're quite far away from it. Most users on the internet are not savvy at all, and I don't see that changing.

I had expected the younger generations to be "digital natives", but they're not. They know their apps and services, but it's not a generalized understanding to how things work or what's common. Imho the fact that adblocker-usage isn't approaching 100% is a powerful demonstration of it.

Additionally, there's the subconscious effects. Even if they consciously understand that it's based on their ad profile, brand will likely still not advertise there. There may be some exceptions (Benetton comes to mind), but I don't think Disney ever wants their ads to be displayed in an article about Auschwitz.

This is so weird to me. When I saw an ad for Toyota whilst watching Unsolved Mysteries in the nineties, I didn't think for a second that Toyota thought aliens were real or whatever. There has always been a complete disconnect between ads and content for me. In fact only recently has that shifted with e.g. podcasts and YouTube channels having sponsors that are explicitly worked into the content and are topical because that's a better way (or the only way for the case of podcasts) to do targeted advertising in these contexts.

I imagine TV before I was born was a little more like this since you could't just buy generic ad space - you needed to deal with the producers of a show specifically to get into their ad slots - but for TV when I was growing up, ads were ads. They'd target your age group (ads for kids toys during breakfast cartoons), but it just never occurred to me that anyone would think it was an endorsement of anything.

This is such a confusing concept to me. Do people really think like that? I know they do now, because it's a self-reinforcing concept. Yelling loudly that ads are an endorsement of content makes it true - since if you're an advertiser and you know that attitude is out there, and you still run an ad, that's now a conscious decision and everybody knows it. But it seems like this came about artificially, via activism, rather than people naturally making the link that ads imply endorsement.

No, they don't think like that. They just don't want advertisers to financially support extremist content.

Maybe it's that TV itself is mostly bland and ad friendly, non-controversial for that very reason. Content that is obviously for entertainment purposes is cool to put ads on. TV had few channels and programs that weren't for the general population, so you wouldn't have The KKK Weekly or Cool Communism that advertisers would have to avoid.

That's different on YouTube, where the content is much more heterogeneous, where you have super-optimized, ad-friendly influencers with millions of subs who take great care not to offend (and are therefore great to throw ads at) next to fringe political ideas and people with mental health issues presenting their world view.

I believe funding is often considered as an endorsement, and ads are the primary source of funding for most media companies. Similarly, you'll often see disclaimers on Twitter "retweet != endorsement" because people tend to understand it as such.

I believe that the bigger deal is subconscious association. I have no idea whether it's true, but putting McDonald's ads next to a documentary on factory farming seems unwise.

Why are you calling people "unsavvy" for understanding the complexity of how money works and how they can influence th behavior of billionaire elites?

You can understand different things to different degrees, you can have a better or worse understanding of web-technology (and computers in general) than of consumer activism. I don't believe that the average consumer has a great understanding of either, but my experience is that they certainly don't understand the technology they use more than they need to.

>No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before.

It's not that simple. The other angle you're missing is that advocacy groups (as a proxy for some customers) pressure advertisers to stop funding entities they don't approve of. E.g. the "Stop Funding Hate" to pressure companies to stop advertising in conservative newspapers.

Therefore, it's not enough if Disney itself doesn't approve of white supremacists. It's also not enough if Disney's customers also know that Disney doesn't approve of neo-Nazis. Instead, protesters would insist that Disney to take further measures of "not funding white supremacists" by not advertising (or allowing Google to show their ads) next to Nazi content.

Thus "brand safety" isn't just about association. It's also about how customers connect the dots between the company and the funding of activities they disapprove of.

[btw, I didn't downvote your comment.]

>BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism

Are you trolling with this comparison? In a thread about de-escalation it seems a bit unwise to casually tie BLM to violence and suggest that it's somehow comparable to white supremacist extremism. I get that you were trying to choose one example from each 'end' of the political spectrum, but I think this particular choice was badly misconceived.

No. First, it’s not a comparison, just 2 examples. Second, I’m pretty sure that many on the opposing end of political spectrum (compared to you) might find it offensive in the other direction. But yea I did expect it to be badly received here on HN.

I think that white supremacists are off the end of the political spectrum, and that we shouldn't worry too much about what offends them. But the issue isn't just the comparison, it's the suggestion that BLM is inherently a violent movement (so that endorsing BLM would equate to endorsing violence). BLM is a broad movement. It's not only people on the left - and certainly not only people on the far left - who support it.

No matter how much you detest them, how can the members of the ruling party, in a country that until very recently had their views enshrined in law, be off the end of the political spectrum?

I mean that white supremacists are outside the range of reasonable political debate.

I would really like to see less of this kind of content on hn.

Me too, but it's a tough situation. There's a lot of 'nod nod wink wink' alt right stuff on the site, and since none of that is banned by mods, I think there ought to be a response to it too. What do you think we should do instead?

> Are you trolling with this comparison?

How long have you been on HN? Begin by assuming good faith, please.

> it seems a bit unwise to casually tie BLM to violence

"unwise" reads like a threat at worst and a warning at best but since I've invoked good faith I'll accept it's poor wording… but what do you actually mean? Is disagreement with your view something that should be avoided on HN? Will the mob (is this what HN readers have become?) descend on anyone for dare suggesting that BLM has been associated with violence or extremism?

>How long have you been on HN?

Considerably longer than you, as you can easily tell by looking at my profile to see when my account was created.

>"unwise" reads like a threat

No, it doesn't. Don't be silly.

>dare suggesting that BLM has been associated with violence or extremism

Most large-scale protest movements attract violent extremists. There are always some violent idiots out there. The point is that BLM is a mainstream political movement, not a violent extremist movement. (Most polls show a majority of Americans supporting the protests.)

Yes it does, and if you’ve been here considerably longer than me then you should know the rules just as well, so try sticking to them. It is not trolling to point to the violence that follows BLM around or you wouldn’t need to produce an apologetic for it. Try the principle of charity and try not to tell others what they should think or write simply because you disagree.

My original post obviously did not contain a "threat". The rest of what you're saying similarly seems to be based on a misconceptions. I think my previous comments speak for themselves, so I'll leave it here.

> "unwise" reads like a threat

reads like. I asked you to clarify but all you've done is dig yourself in, ironically on a post about providing mea culpa. If you don't wish to clarify, that's your decision, but please show some awareness in the way you write as what else should one conclude other than you really wanted someone else to shut up? The absence of any other explanation and your unwillingness to avoid clarifying or providing an apology and accepting it was a mistake is unhelpful.

What's unwise about it? I guess we'll never know.

I just meant that it's unwise, i.e. not a good idea, to suggest in passing that BLM is an inherently violent movement, as this kind of inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory statement is not likely to lead to a productive discussion. I am not sure why you think I meant anything else.

Thank you for being good enough to clarify, I appreciate it. My objection was sincere, I accept that your words were and are sincere too and not designed to elicit a malign outcome. Hopefully what follows will allow you to see why I would think they might have.

> this kind of inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory statement is not likely to lead to a productive discussion

I disagree that it's inaccurate, and hence is not unnecessary nor inflammatory. However, instead of being bald men fighting over a comb about whether prominent BLM members calling whites "sub-humxn"[Toronto] and calling for violence implicitly[NY1] or explicitly[NY2] is any kind of evidence of BLM itself being inherently violent (I accept it may or may not), let's focus on the general point by leaning on J. S. Mill's words from On Liberty[Mill]:

> Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

My favourite part of the whole book.

> I am not sure why you think I meant anything else.

Threats are often given as ostensibly well meaning advice that dissuade, or attempt to dissuade, someone from continuing on a course of action via an unspoken alternative that is personally bad. The discontinuance will happen to benefit the kindly person. Was the advice about unwise things…

- apparently well meaning? - attempting to dissuade someone from continuing their action? - would it benefit you? - did you make explicit what the alternative was?

Then it may appear like a threat.

We also live in an age of increasing censorship, by government, by corporation, and by groups in society who are willing to shut down discussion by their opponents. It used to be "conservatives" burning books and railing against gangsta rap, now it's "liberals" with cancel culture and pile ons. To hear an attempt by a (possible) supporter of BLM, on an online forum, to be quiet, that is clearly in threat territory. I've experienced threats online of many kinds and they're not fun, and they often look similar to this case.

Like I wrote above, I fully accept your explanation and I hope you accept mine.

[JSMill] https://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

[NY1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fz4ZpZGkkw It's out of context because it's short but it's not misleading because…

[NY2] https://youtu.be/NZEulL30vdY?t=26 …he repeats it too often, and with less of the "figurative" nature. "or we will burn this country to ashes", to a crowd is incitement to violence in my book. The speeches are full of violent rhetoric.

[Toronto] https://thenationalpulse.com/news/blm-white-folks-govt-award...

I did not make a threat. If you think you need to write paragraphs and paragraphs to explain why I did, you are probably just off base on this one. I am also not calling for anyone to be censored, so most of your post is irrelevant.

The length of an explanation has no connection to the complexity, validity or soundness of any point, concept or idea under discussion, anywhere, at any time, in any language, so if we're looking for irrelevancies we should start with your complaint.

I would suggest that if you don't wish for your utterances to be examined or misconstrued then you might try to avoid speech that appears threatening, and instead inject more sincerity in any defence you make, otherwise your opponent will feel justified in their scepticism of your intentions.

In short (since you appear to favour succinctness), you'd be wise to be more careful in future ;-)

> How long have you been on HN? Begin by assuming good faith, please.

You should really take your own advice considering you asked them to assume in good faith but then immediately prior did not assume good faith at all.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt explicitly and reminded them of the rules - what more do you want?

Their reply shows I was wrong to give the benefit of the doubt and that they really need a reminder of the rules. Feel free to come up with more “no it’s you” replies if you like but they’re unhelpful, unwanted, unwarranted, and directed towards the wrong person.

You should follow the rules when you're attempting to claim someone else is not following the rules.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I didn't dismiss anything, nor did I take the weakest plausible interpretation - I followed up by asking for a clarification.

Anything else you would like my help with?

Edit: Ah! I see now. You're bothered by my response to you the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730545

That's childish. Please, go and play somewhere else.

I didn't even see your reply until you brought it up. More often than not for things like that I'll drop my perspective and leave. Otherwise if I took umbrage with your comment I would've actually replied which since you seemed to look through my post history you can also see I'm not one to shy away from an argument for better or worse.

But it seems like you're not interested in sticking to the rules yourself funnily enough. If you want to assume there was some grand conspiracy instead of me just reading a thread and seeing a bad remark by all means.

> But it seems like you're not interested in sticking to the rules yourself funnily enough.

Telling someone they appear to be breaking the rules and then asking them to clarify (something they refused to do or walk back) is uncharitable?

What is the best way to interpret that comment? I'd love to hear.

> No reasonable long-term user

There are a lot of unreasonable people out there. There are also people who get a kick out of causing a scene. All it takes is one Buzzfeed (or whomever...) article about this exact situation to make other advertisers run to the hills.

It's what YouTube's Adpocalypse was all about.

Any brand wants potential customers

And social networks have hundreds of millions of them

Do you think Coca Cola cares if KKK members drink it and bottles of Coke are shown in pictures of their rallies?

Brand awareness is more important to them

Starbucks cups with name spelled wrong are the perfect example: people think they are funny and post the picture of the cup with the Starbucks logo making the brand more popular

So what seem an honest mistake is actually a well thought brand awareness campaign

You're right, Coca Cola does not care if KKK members drink their product; a sale is a sale.

They most certainly do care about being seen to be actively targeting the KKK audience.

I wouldn't be so sure about it.

https://creativeloafing.com/content-219258-Activists-block-S...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/opinion/when-jim-crow-dra...

https://medium.com/@FrankCastro/she-doesnt-look-american-coc...

> fascists on both the far-left

While I appreciate your comment otherwise, fascism is universally agreed to be a far-right ideology and claiming otherwise at this point in history can't really be taken as anything but inflammatory, which isn't what belongs here in an otherwise insightful comment.

Good people on both sides...

Actually the full quote is:

> fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate

According to Merriam-Webster, fascism is:[0]

> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

It's true that some on both the "left" and "right" (which is an absurdly simplistic one-dimensional distinction) are over-the-top extremist and forcibly suppress their opposition. However, that's only one aspect of the definition of "fascist".

Even so, Merriam-Webster doesn't restrict fascism to the right wing, so I defer to it. But Wikipedia does.[1]

Last, I note that the Soviet Union was arguably fascist. While it didn't exalt any nation above the individual, it did exalt the Party, and more generally the state. And its government was certainly autocratic and dictatorial.

0) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

>the Soviet Union was arguably fascist //

You appear to be starting from an assumption that everything USSR did, politically, was left-wing; and thus concluding that fascism can be left wing.

A dictator is diametrical opposed to left-wing ideology.

What you're doing is like saying uxoricide (murdering your wife) is part of FOSS, because a proponent of FOSS did it.

> You appear to be starting from an assumption that everything USSR did, politically, was left-wing; and thus concluding that fascism can be left wing.

No, I did not. Basically I'm arguing that the USSR pretended to be "left-wing" but were actually "right-wing". So perhaps they were fascist, but that doesn't imply that truly left-wing governments and movements are fascist.

The USSR is what happens when you take left wing to the extreme. Go too far replacing free speech with right speech and you get censorship. Censorship requires a heavy police state to enforce.

It's the natural progression.

> the Soviet Union was arguably fascist

No, it wasn't.

Fascism is not simply "what you don't like"

If USSR was arguably fascist, so are the USA then.

Do you think bombing other countries for their oil or to seize control of countries close to the enemy borders (like in Vietnam) looks more democratic or fascist?

USSR has been at war in Afghanistan for 9 years, mainly because USA financed the resistance, creating and arming those mujahideen that years later became "terrorists" simply because they weren't needed anymore...

USA has been at war in Afghanistan for 19 years now (and counting) and the evidence to go to war were falsified.

Fascism is a specific thing, if we broaden the meaning of that word, anything can be called fascist.

We are long past the point of "fascism" meaning anything but "government that hurts people"

As Italian, with a grandfather imprisoned by the fascists and the other sent by the fascist regime to die in Russia, I can tell you what fascism is and what is not and I can tell you we never thought it meant "government that hurts people" like nazism is not just "people who wear swastikas", if you use it that way, you are wrong.

My grandmother died few moths ago, she was from 1922 and escaped from the fascists on one side and the Marocchinate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate) on the other side, while my grandfather was in jail even if he was ill with tuberculosis, my father house was occupied by fascists and he had to hide from the day he was born until he was five, and when the war ended his father never came back.

I think it's not long past when people that suffered from it are still alive, don't you think?

You're oversimplifying something that's been very hurtful for my country, the history of my continent and for my family.

But let me make a simple example for you: fascism was about separating people in classes, USSR was about eliminating classes.

Fascism was about colonialism and they did unspeakable things in North Africa, justifying their actions with he excuse that "black people are not humans, they are like animals"

USSR never did something similar, because of people's race.

Fascism was about individualism, USSR was about colletivism.

Etc. etc. etc.

Just to exemplify for you what fascism is and what is not: US is more fascist than USSR could ever have been.

And not because I like USSR, but because words have meanings and it's not for you to decide what fascism means when we are the ones who faced it, in our houses, fought it, defeated it, and rebuilt from the ruins and the trail of dead fascism left.

BL matters, Italian lives matters too.

That might be what it used to mean, but it certainly does not mean that now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#"Fascist"_as_a_pejorat.... You can call it wrong all you want, but the use of the word has been diluted enough that the meaning that you seek is not people believe when they use it.

Fair enough. So now it's just an insult.

But that doesn't mean that it's lost its actual meaning, when used professionally.

I agree with most of your comment. So I guess that I wasn't very clear in mine, if it elicited yours :(

> If USSR was arguably fascist, so are the USA then.

I wouldn't argue too hard against that. It's just that the US hides it better. Or at least, it seems that way at times.

But my main point is that the term "fascist" is being misused to mean extremist and intolerant of opposition. So many today who are "left-wing" are so, but that doesn't mean that they're fascist.

There is not universal agreement that the earth is round.

But a better word choice by op might have been extreme authoritarians, but a sub-optimal word choice hardly makes a comment intentionally inflammatory.

Left and right are arbitrary labels applied to the two largest opposing parties in a country. They aren't ideologies.

Left and right are indeed not ideologies but properties of ideologies and they are well-defined in mainstream political science models of classification. In all of those models, fascism is a far-right ideology.

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