Facebook Has Been Showing Military Gear Ads Next to “Insurrection” Posts
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
This software is working exactly as it was designed to. I'm sure somebody could (and probably will, now that it's made the news) add a rule that makes an exception in this case. But this is going to keep happening, and keep happening, and keep happening, as long as we continue allowing systems to automate our content-feeds, optimized for getting us to spend money.
People preparing for revolt buy revolt supplies, water is wet, more news at 11.
Adtech is a cancer and it's time to cut it out using every legislative and regulatory option we have.
Put Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai behind bars and the problem will correct after that.
The simplest solution might be privacy protections, which (among other things) would indirectly kneecap targeted content curation, due to a lack of data.
But yes, that's absolutely part of the puzzle. Companies who made money by peddling armor and ammo and gear into an extremist community they were simultaneously trying to moderate need to be held partially responsible.
And that goes for the apocalyptic end-times mess that has infested the gun and gun-peripheral industries too. If you spend your advertising budget telling your customers they need your products to "protect their freedoms" then you don't get a pass if they end up sacking congress to do it.
There are a lot of sites out there that publish much more objectionable content. Should we shut all of them down as well?
Probably not, but insurrection is. The ad isn’t the problem here, the context & juxtaposition is the problem. It’s not a call to shut down ads, it’s a call to avoid accidentally (or worse, intentionally) supporting illegal speech and violence.
If Facebook is distributing illegal messages inciting, or that constitute part of a conspiracy aimed at, insurrection, that is obviously a problem.
What legal ads it shows next to such messages is, if a legitimate concern at all, orders of magnitude less important.
If the content is not illegal, and the ads are not illegal, I’m not sure what the issue is at all.
Take a news article about a governer starting a new coronavirus lockdown. This article having ads for hand sanitizer, and this article having ads for zip-ties, are two very different messages.
Have you ever considered that what is illegal can be changed, and that the commenters you are replying to may feel that some part of this industry should be made illegal? It used to be legal to advertise cigarettes to children, and now it's not.
If you want to argue that it will be difficult to write and pass legislation that actually accomplishes anything meaningful, I'd agree. But to say "no laws are being broken so who cares?" is just so unproductive. Something has to be done here, and I think I would rather have it be done at a government level so that I can at least feel like I had some say in it.
Sure, and I’ve seen plenty of decent arguments for moving the line of legality on the main content (less so on the content of the ads at issue, though there might be some.) Feel free to replace “should be illegal” for “is illegal” in the grandparent post.
Doesn’t really change the basic point, which is that I fail to see much argument for why the juxtaposition should be of concern that doesn’t depend on one of the items (most likely the main content rather than the ads) being of much greater concern to start with.
This seems like an issue that cannot be solved (yet). No human editor would place insensitive adverts next to related content, and I think we're a way off ML knowing the myriad subtleties that could be involved.
A sibling content mentioned adding rules to stop this particular case in point, but that just sounds like an endless game of whack-a-mole.
Questions like these are probably why the bill Josh Hawley wrote is clearly targeted at Facebook and Google, what with the $1.5bil revenue number: https://outreach.senate.gov/iqextranet/iqClickTrk.aspx?&cid=...
(huh, is that a click tracker? URL from https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-introduces-bill...)
I guess this is still somewhat straw man. Ads near politics and opinion on a politically oriented site also isn't what was being called out exactly. I guess that it could be summarized as advertising the ammunition to carry out a violent insurrection next to the call to create a violent insurrection (illegally), on a site that is primarily social, mass market, and supposedly politically neutral, that was the problem being called out. Trying to draw broader lines than that makes any argument specious at best.
> Does the legality of this advertising depend on whether a person or an algorithm selected the advertising?
Currently, no. Currently the advertising is legal regardless. (And note, again, the legality of the ads wasn't the issue being discussed.)
Why not the CEOs of the companies using the targeted keywords/demographic information?
The "it's not the gun that kills, it's the people who kill" argument?
Hitman (because Gunslinger is too cool) = Facebook company
Targets = Capitol Rioters
Hirers = Gun companies
Bullets = Ads
The analogy works because although the companies were unintentionally blanket-targeting their victims, a real world equivalent would still be persecuted. Hence everyone involved should be punished - the rioters (who already are), Facebook the company, the gun companies (albeit in minor fashion like fines because it was stil unintentional), and Facebook the platform (which should be neutered).
That attitude is the problem: why do we go straight from "This is a problem!" to the government? Aren't there solutions other than making things illegal? Is it just because making things illegal is easier than talking to our neighbors and friends, and giving them peaceful solutions to their problems, doing business locally, and refusing to do business through online ads that use techniques that lead to results like this?
People who call for insurrection are usually plenty aware of where to get things like this anyway. It's a bad look for Facebook, sure; but are these ads likely to do real harm? I doubt it. There's plenty of time for sensible people to make a difference without creating more anger by trying to make even more restrictive laws.
This isn’t just about going out and talking to people who disagree with you. Part of the issue is that the news bubbles that have been created out of news and stories and conspiracies that algorithms know we will react to chip away at our ability to have those conversations with each other.
You know, I watch a lot of Fox News, I have some deeply conservative friends and acquaintances and dude they live in a parallel universe. We need the government to collapse those universes together so we can have those conversations in the first place.
The ads to harm because they reinforce the structural walls between universes which prevent the necessary conversation from taking place. It’s pretty bad out there dude.
Regarding the rest I’m not saying don’t talk to them, By all means invite crazy Susie over for dinner. Have those conversations. It’s tilting at windmills as long as they continue to get their reality defined by what they’re going to react to online and in media.
Humans aren’t really able to process an objective reality, we live in a world of abstractions. Our preconceived notions of what the universe and objective reality are define are personal realities. Reality is all around each and everyone of us, if objective reality were all it took, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.
It seems like you haven't really thought about this and are just personally against adtech and those companies. That's not how rights and legislation should be decided.
In context with the fact that Facebook also served up the precise content day after day, year after year, which put people (the whole population) into this inconsistent-with-reality, individually tailored emotional state which is nothing if not a constant reflection and validation of their worst tendencies and pre-dispositions.
Think of an honestly shitty person whose problems are of their own creation in every way (for the purpose of this thought experiment, you can even pretend it’s not you). Do you think Facebook ever gave them a series of posts that reflects that? Or would they log on to see all the ways other people are the problem? And that’s everyone.
We all have flaws, but this is a profit-driven platform. And if you’re trying to sell someone something, making them feel like the true piece of shit they really are isn’t exactly in the ABCs of how to make a sale, much less at their machine-driven scale.
Facebook is basically the automated version of the guy rubbing a boxer’s shoulders in the corner of the ring, whispering in their ear a never-ending slew of made-up things the other guy said so that when the fight starts, he’s angry as can be.
Selling items and running ads is not the same as supporting or fostering a bad act. People can similarly buy knives or many other potential and actual weapons, it's still the user that's ultimately at fault.
Now, sure, it can happen because you unleashed an algorithm on the world and don't know what it does, but you're still responsible for it.
Perhaps you want the government to tell you what you can say but I would prefer to go in the opposite direction and completely divorce speech from action, and stop trampling on our rights over the actions of a few. This endless shifting of blame solves nothing.
Do you still think your position has merit? :-)
"Strangely" enough this does not apply when corporations' money is at stake, hence sites like The Pirate Bay are held responsible. Taking 2 opposite approaches for the same issue in order for the lobbying corporations to profit is a sign of acting in bad faith.
Facebook built this 2 billion people village, exploited them and collected taxes, then said "You know what? Policing it is hard so let the governments do it". And the governments should do it. EaaS - Enforcement as a service. And as any service it should cost. No personal liability needed, once money starts pouring out of the companies' coffers you'll see how quickly they find a solution.
It’s often said that companies aren’t people and not alive or conscious. I agree to the first one, but for the rest, is there a mathematical proof for those?
Exactly this is why I think micro targeting should simply be banned by governments.
I mean:
- It's fundamental meant to manipulate people.
- It's easy to abuse and not really possible to control.
- Discriminatory micro advertisement, weather on a gender, race, religion or similar basis are pretty common for affected people, but at the same time hard to detect for Facebook or any control organization.
- Category combinations which indirectly target addicts are repeatedly used to target them with ad's promoting what this people are addicted to, e.g. gambling.
- *The value it provides for the consumer is questionable.*
- *The value it provides for a ethnically acceptable free marked are questionable.*
- As far as I can tell the only ones noticeable profiting (and as such majorly losing out from a ban) from it are such which act without any regard for the health and dignity/well being of the consumer and society in total (well and big ad platforms).
Any site that doesn't allow opting out of micro targeting should be banned by government.
But to say nothing would be lost from banning it because its always used without regard for health and dignity is way to far.
Brands like Zappos Adaptive which sells adult shoes that don't need to be tied to people with Autism. Its very hard to do this kind of sales without targeting people affected by disability. The same goes for companies innovating in Wheelchairs, diabetes care, etc..
Because I actually find these recommendations valuable.
In general what I am against is advertisements where
- the advertiser can choose targets based on too fine grained categories (micro categories)
- people get classified with too fine grained categories
(Both points are mostly the same.)
So "people who bought this book also bought books X,Y,Z" is IMHO fine, even if it can sometime lead to bad situations as it can be abused much less. (EDIT: But that partially because it shows real products, "people who have seen XY news also see Z news" would be a different thing.)
Manipulation implies that you're lying to people to get them to buy things, but is it easy to make that argument for FB? What would be the leading argument here?
And why should we think that automated processes tend towards manipulation (lying) as a strategy in the marketplace?
No it means you are trying to change their behavior, usually in an unscrupulous way.
These ads aren't lying. But they are certainly pushing a narrative. Which at best, is normalizing the violent actions taken. And at worst, is recruiting people for that cause.
You don't need to lie to do that.
I'm sure people will claim that this problem should have been foreseen, but it's really only obvious in hindsight. Just a few weeks ago, none of us would ever have thought to plan for the possibility of the US Capitol being stormed. Of course we could know that there would be problematic edge cases, but we couldn't have anticipated every single one, nonetheless handled all of them.
I think we sometimes forget that if Facebook were a person, they still wouldn't be old enough to drive. For all the billions of users and billions of dollars, this is still a technology in its infancy. I'll gladly hand out pitchforks if it's shown that Facebook has been dragging its feet fixing known problems, or if it's shown they've feigned ignorance about a problem they were warned would happen, but if we forbid any innovation that carries the risk of unforeseen issues, we will be banning all innovation.
You would think we would have gotten wise to this problem by now but nope.
My facebook account is very old, when i was more of an active user I did all the usual posts/photos that a lot of liberal urban types contribute.
Anyway, after posting some anti-insurrection posts I start noticing all sort of "tacti-cool" gear ads or targeted T-shirt s with some very macho-man hyper masculinity phrases on them.
This is very much _not_ me. Now I keep facebook on a tight leash (FB container, privacy settings turned to max) so my guess is that someone out there is spending a lot of money on a huge ad target or somehow facebook thinks anyone who is posting about a US insurrection would like to participate with some neat military cosplay kit.
It's oddly reassuring. This shows FB doesn't know anything about what I want. At least, their ad algorithms don't. Feels like a very primitive response on their part.
Had something similar happen with journals of all things. Around 6 months ago, a friend of mine shared her new physical journal that she was proud of. Said she wanted to get back to writing her novel. I hit like or love to show support. Ever since then, there's been a massive deluge of ads for journals and various writer creativity tools. Even though I've never once sought out anything related to journals or creative writing.
I think this is really it. The profit margins on this stuff is insane. And the volumes of money typical people spend on this stuff is also insane.
(speculation here) The insurrection is probably opening the door for new customers. I would not be surprised to hear a people in zero-gun households are now seeking to acquire their first one. That allure of "protection" is strong. And urbanites represent a huge untapped market for guns and tactical gear. So it makes sense to push ads on these people.
Going from zero to one is the biggest leap. I bet there's usually some event for people that primes them to pull the trigger. You buy that first one for protection, but the next ones are because they are fun, fashionable, or an investment. I know a fair number of people with gun+related collections which exceed the value of their cars. The fact that gun collecting has become fairly profitable in the past few years seems to have really spurred a frenzy of buying. If you can buy something for $800, and sell it for $1300 in three years, then why not buy as much as you can afford? This then fuels shortages, raising prices.
So yeah, it might be very much _not_ you, right now, but I bet they are hoping enough ads will change your mind. I mean, you want to be the cool, macho person that you family and friends turn to for protection in these trying times, right? /s
This happened all summer when the crowd that paid big bucks to live in inner suburbs realized that the peaceful protests were uncomfortably close.
>And urbanites represent a huge untapped market for guns and tactical gear
Minorities are a far bigger untapped market demographic.
About 40% of sales in 2020[1] were to first time owners, I think it's a fairly safe bet 2021 will increase those numbers.
[1]https://www.nssf.org/first-time-gun-buyers-grow-to-nearly-5-...
There has been an epic increase in gun, ammo and armor sales this year to people of all political persuasions. Gun folks are bad with this anyways due to the political cycle and ammo shortages and bans of various types of items, but there is a genuine shortage where people who are afraid of riots and violence in their cities across the US have been buying up anything and everything.
Not every city got looted, but a lot of major downtown areas did, and the police in a number of cities are going through real attrition, to the point where a lot of crime will just not be dealt with. Not to mention it will be extremely difficult to hire more police officers after they spend a year demonizing them and forcing them to deal with riots that they effectively are not allowed to stop (especially Seattle- where I live- and Portland).
Now, I have a different theory with a lot of the tactical shit. I think a huge amount of it it is hypebeast/instagram-driven fashion for a large segment of young American men with disposable incomes and no bars and sports open. Cosplay, if you will- and it's openly admitted.
PS: Assholes who are buying all the .22LR, please stop/go for a different caliber. Some of us like target shooting and want to continue our hobby.
Ammunition has been difficult to get since April and its going to stay that way for some time I think. Lots of popular models of firearm have been non stop sold out. The tactical gear industry has seen a huge boom in sales. What used to be very small and niche is now massive. Before 2020 most people already in the hobby didn't own plate carriers, battle belts, helmets etc. Now that stuff is just as scarce as anything else.
https://www.webfx.com/social-media/how-much-does-facebook-ad....
Edit: Fortunately I find Nigel Farage trying to sell me financial products fairly amusing...
The most disconcerting to me was an ad showcasing a "tactical hooded trench coat"[0], with the model holding an AK in the FB ad. I mean, nobody is going hunting, or defending their home, with their tactical hooded trench coat. Seemed pretty squarely targeted at the aspiring insurrectionist crowd.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for letting people buy whatever strange clothes they want. If I have any point here it's that maybe FB doesn't get to claim the moral high ground when they're pushing ads using AKs as props, targeted at the crowd that stormed the capital (also, they need to fix their algorithm if they're pushing them to me).
People put those ads there and maintained them there for a reason, and that reason is those ads are working.
TBH I was expecting to see actual trench coats but they all seem like normal tight-ish fitting jackets in various grays, greens, browns and camo.
But I did screenshot it previously: https://imgur.com/gallery/bxcK7zb
If that's the look of the HN demographic, I'm even more out of touch than I thought I was.
I was seeing stuff like this which albeit somewhat tacky doesn't exactly scream IRA like that does.
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1nW0maN_rK1RkHFqDq6yJAFXaa/Fre...
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB19LG5p3MPMeJjy1Xdq6ysrXXaY/Tac...
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oqoAAOSwGj9dpoA7/s-l300.jpg
https://image.dhgate.com/0x0s/f2-albu-g6-M01-FD-51-rBVaR1rw2...
[1]https://danielkquemist.artstation.com/projects/lVx8Ne?album_...
[2]https://www.nikiluwa.com/products/mens-tactical-hooded-jacke...
[3]https://www.blaroken.com/products/mens-tactical-hooded-jacke...
The companies selling the suppressor kits claim they are legitimate auto parts. They clearly aren't.
Some people have claimed that it would be legal to buy these if you applied for a license to manufacture a suppressor, but good luck arguing that in federal court, especially since these are manufactured in China. Both the import of these goods, and buying without the correct federal license are felonies....
And yet they are all over Facebook. And people are buying them.
Here is the crazy thing. I enjoy shooting as a hobby, and could understand if FB chose to show me adds for legitimate firearm accessory companies.
I am not a car guy.
Either FB add targeting is terrible, or they can connect the dots between these obviously illegal "solvent traps" and people who are interested in firearms.
This isn't a post made by a random FB user, it's an ad on their ad network on their platform. At what point does FB facebook become culpable?
The companies had targeted me by gender and age, and a couple of other broad identifiers I cant remember, but nothing about my hobbies, search history, or political orientation.
It's possible that FB didn't show me all of the criteria used to target these ads.
That still doesn't take away from the question of at what point do they become culpable with facilitating a felony offense?
Just because something is hard to do at scale (in this case review ads for illegal behavior), doesn't absolve a company from the responsibility to act.
To be clear, I don't know the answer to this question. Parlor got dumped for not doing enough (and personally I'm okay with that), but how do we determine if Facebook is doing enough?
Over half a century of life might not have made me much of a programmer, but one thing it has taught me time and again is that if an amateur lawyer says something is “legal if...” and your gut said otherwise, go with your gut. It is as if they forget that the argument is not with me, but the hypothetical judge they’re going to stand before (as you point out).
I guess my life is more boring than I thought or the Facebook containers on my computer and phone do a really good job of keeping FB in the dark.
A lot of "if" statements in your comment.
The ones I saw were clearly not manufactured in the USA, and based on the comment sections were clearly understood to be suppressor components.
Lots of YouTube/internet "I'm not a lawyer, but..." comments floating out there.
Even if we were being extraordinary charitable, all plausible deniability goes out the window with even a cursory reading of the the description and the comments for these items.
(Not 100% sure of the last one, but I know I'm close.)
Like, we're discussing ad delivery, not the fact that a country allows companies to sell all kinds of weapons, and equipment to the general public... so I think that accurate ad targeting is the least of the problems.
It's just odd.
>I would bet any EU state (and in case of my EU country I can buy an AR-15 or any sort of semi-automatic weapon)
Well in the case of my EU country we can't buy AR-15 or any semi-automatic rifle. The weapons owned here are mostly for hunting, not for sports/self defense.
Because I might even bet that yes, you most definitely can buy an AR15 or any semiautomatic rifle just fine.
Most of Europe allows sports shooting, for example (from the top of my hear what I know for sure): Finland Sweden Norway Estonia Czech Republic Poland Germany France Italy Switzerland Austria Spain
And I haven't even put research into the rest of the countries
These are the types of licences we have: http://armas.mai-gov.info/obtencao-de-licencas/
Now you can buy weapons of the same caliber, for hunting (but you need hunting licensing).
Edit: Ok I need to clarify this. Because we have a different name for specific weapons.
Here we can sell semiautomatic rifles (we call them "carabinas", I didn't label them as rifles so my bad), for hunting (a specific class, for boars, deer, etc). The thing is every weapon that's imported in Portugal gets and inspection and a classification if it's a military weapon or not. An AR15 is considered a military grade weapon by our government standards.
So yes, you can buy some specific models of semiautomatic rifles (for hunting), but you can't buy military grade semiautomatic rifles.
You can't buy an AR15.
> So yes, you can buy some specific models of semiautomatic rifles (for hunting), but you can't buy military grade semiautomatic rifles
The semi-automatic rifles that you can buy in Portugal include the Remington 700 and the Thompson Performance Center T/C. Both can come chambered in .308 Win or 6.5 Creedmoor. Those cartridges have an immense stopping power and are significantly more powerful than the usual .223/5.56 you see in the AR-15 platform. Looking at hunting stores from Portugal, you can easily see those two rifles with 5 or 10 round magazines, same limits as the AR-15 in California.
The Remington 700 has been widely used by the military all over the world, including the US. The M24 sniper rifle is the Remington 700, but with a heavier barrel (in order to use .300 Win which the US Marine Corps preferred).
So, why is in your opinion the AR-15 platform "military grade", and the hunting rifles available in Portugal not? Knowing that both platforms have been used by the military in combat situations, and knowing the hunting platforms usually have much more powerful cartridges?
This is a question you'd need to ask to the portuguese authority that manages weapons importation at the customs, which curiously, it's a procedure that must be done in the presence of a customs oficial, an expert of the Police (PSP), and the General Management of Weaponry and Defense Equipment (Direcção-Geral de Armamento e Equipamento de Defesa).
So I think it's their opinion and expertise that dictates such decisions? No idea! But I don't see it written anywhere that such specific weapon/platform is banned/forbidden.
Curious fact, just came across this information, apparently not so long ago civilians could buy fully automatic rifles in Portugal , you just had to belong to a "club"! It was one of the few countries that allowed that, like Pakistan an Yemen - I had no ideia just found this out. Law changed from pressure of EU and UN.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contr%C3%B4le_des_armes_%C3%A0...
In Switzerland, on the other hand, you can have full auto. Europe is not a gun-free zone like Americans seem to think, from both sides of the aisle.
And they're not objects for public display.
But on the "objects for public display", I sense some hostility towards guns and gun culture in general. Maybe that's your personal perspective being projected onto the whole? My brother in law is from France and he is a huge gun nerd. His weapons were "objects for public display" just like any other weapon in a gun store in America, but I really miss the point here.
Do you feel comfortable around guns? Have you ever experienced a shooting sport? You should definitely try, it is super fun, specially when you have knowledgeable people around. And gun clubs in Europe are super welcoming to new members.
I've grown around hunting weapons, mainly shotguns and rifles since my grandfather was an hunter. But all my education revolving weapons is that they are tools - dangerous tools - to hunt. Everyone of my friends I grew up with had family members that hunted, and some of them became hunters themselves. For sport some shoot plates, but a lot of those places closed own over the years due to polution.
The weapons body are made of wood and usually have some sort of carving in the metal accents. Hell, some of them were literally works of art - with duck/foxes/boars/deer/flower motives. I dont' recall seeing anyone who had weapons that were "military" style, neither in shape or even color/pattern.
Now that I think of it, there was some sort of snob attitude around all of that (like usually only people with a lot of money could buy access to big game properties).
At least this is from my life, in my country living on the countryside. Weapons and the subject revolving weapons are limited to specific contexts, so for me it's just odd a lot of what happens in the USA.
As a kid I found weapons fun, had air pressured rifles to hunt birds and shoot at targets, airsoft guns, etc.
Seems to be selling AR15s just fine.
And "military grade ar15" is not a thing.
Some licenses are strictly for law enforcement for example.
I didn't say military grade ar15 is thing, i said our authorities can consider that a weapon is for military use. It's their call, not mine, or yours.
If you don't mean what you say then don't say it.
I didn't say i didn't meant to say, I'm saying what's in our law.
EDIT: I'm wrong on body armor. I could have sworn at least some of it was restricted and required a license.
In so far as to how dangerous it is, there are 630,000 legal full-auto/select-fire weapons in the US. They do require a Class III license to purchase and own and there have been no new ones since 1986. As I recall, of those 630,000, only 3 have been used illegally since 1934 and 2 of those were, ironically, by cops.
Still, as shown by the media at least, weapons became an accessory in protests and public manifestations over the past... 4 years? Even though they're not used, people have demonstrations of power by presenting their weapons.
But again, my culture is very different from USA, so it's hard for me to grasp such thing.
The scary guns you see on TV just LOOK like military weapons, they don't FUNCTION like them.
And apparently it is much needed:
https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/procurado-por-tenta...
https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/homem-ameaca-mulher...
https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/gnr-em-alerta-maxim...
Plus we don't have terrorist attacks (domestic and foreigners), we don't have religion fanatics that go on killing sprees, we have a good public healthcare system that helps mentally hill (we don't have serial killers, and the ones we had didn't achieve the pop culture status), we have drug addiction under control, so yeah... it's really not useful to have body armor.
Just to give you some perspective - I live for 11 years in the capital, and even lived near a social project where there was shady people and A LOT of police activity, and never heard a single gun shot.
It is a personal protection item like any other. Is it useful in New York City or Lisbon? Probably not. But the same applies to other PPEs and we don't shame people for wanting to buy/use them. If a person feels safer using X, then fine, use it.
As a society we used to mock people that bought Gas Masks and Respirators, marginalizing them as crazy. Then 2020 happened and all of a sudden every single gas mask, including useless old surplus, was out of stock.
Being odd doesn't mean it's ridiculous, or preposterous, means it's strange to me and my reality. Strange doesn't mean it's good or bad, means it's strange.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
(aside: this conversation has jumped the shark IMHO, so this is where I'm getting off. peace, literally)
I understand that shooting high powered rifles is a lot of fun, so recreation makes sense with respect to weaponry, but I'm legitimately confused about why a civilian would ever want to own body armor. I can't imagine it's terribly comfortable to wear, and it doesn't seem very fun to me.
Call it a failure of imagination, but to me it seems exceedingly unwise for a law abiding civilian to be entering a situation where body armor would be helpful (and I say this as a firearm owner).
Civilian weapons R&D, mining where explosives are being used, private security work, civilian firearm instruction, protection for targetted individuals e.g. Malcom X / MLK, Journalists in conflict zones (you saw them warn in DC during the protests as well)
Albiet the U.S. has and always will be a special case due to high firearm ownership and rather open ownership of those sorts of things.
Once upon a time, advertisers would struggle to create an ad campaign that had broad appeal, that was disseminated broadly. Think Budweiser Frogs and other superbowl commercials. Now a campaign can be targeted to divorced white men over 40 whose ex's have remarried and consist of allusions to the false fact that jerks like your ex's new husband drink Miller, therefore you should drink Bud.
What is bad is with A_B testing, machine learning and low cost targeting, the process of creating those campaign gets easier. When applied to politics it gets even worse. Because now you can target your racists message to just the racists, and your wholesome family message to soccer moms, safe in the knowledge that these contradictory messages will never been seen by the wrong audience thanks to Facebook et. al.
So of course ads for tactical gear are going to show up next to insurrection posts by the kookitariat and ads for homesafety will show up next to cat picture posts by soccer moms - even if it is the same company selling the same products.
Edit: wow, that blew up. For the record, I don't think Facebook should be shut down, and I don't think Parler should have either. I'm rather anti-social media, so I've never used either. We should have better reasons for doing things, and stick to them. Section 230 exists for a reason.
I abhor both Parler and Facebook. In the context of these threads, I don't think either has done anything illegal, which is what passes for "ethics" in our economy. Of course IANAL.
I don't think Apple, Google and Amazon did anything illegal to Parler. And until these kinds of companies are legally and explicitly made into utilities, I don't think we can expect them to do anything except whatever they want.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-protests-facebo...
I don’t trust FB enough to want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this would still be true if I did.
In this interview (audio, but there's a transcript) Matze details some of it, and basically explains that violent-but-popular content is going to be left up because of "free speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.
And if that's the baseline, Facebook and Twitter have far more objectionable content yet-to-be-removed.
Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.
And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.
But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.
There is already a zero-tolerance approach to numerous extremist groups, regardless of whether they are active on American soil or not. Why should this be treated any differently?
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. But the answer is an elephant-in-the room kind of thing so I think it needs to be said:
The reason is that the overlap between "extremism" and our (now) minority political party is so large as to have muddled the distinction. Per one poll, 45% of Trump voters approve of the sacking of the capitol. It's really not possible to distinguish people who merely post angry political speech and the ones who stray into extremist rhetoric about revolution and violence. The same people are doing all of it.
So right now, "moderating communities with extreme content" simply looks a lot like "censoring republicans". But... I don't see how that gets better by outlawing the moderation. Republicans need to fix their rhetoric first.
Being as how Twitter isn't shutdown for the same offense, I'm also curious as to why Parler was "treated differently"?
Political pressure, period.
Parler's raison d'etre is that it makes no such efforts. From the AWS team's motion to dismiss:
"There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature. AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so. AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content, including plans for violence to disrupt the impending Presidential transition."
From: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Washington_Western_Distric...
That may be a distinction without a difference. What company failed to even attempt to moderate?
It's only when it's the people that it's the problem.
It's never the 1%.
I miss the occupy movement, at least they talked sense.
Edit: For a multitude of reasons - money, money, and money - I don't expect any vendors would discontinue service with Facebook. The question is more of a thought exercise.
Depends on their contracts and that’s all it depends on.
That's not true. Laws supercede contracts. You cannot write a contract that creates new law between parties.
But there are still laws that require you to _remove_ certain content (child porn comes to mind, but also material that infringes copyrights, etc) once you are aware of it.
Concretely, given this sequence of events:
1. You have a web site that allows people to post pictures. You moderate them some.
2. Someone who is not you or one of your employees/contractors posts child porn.
3. Before your moderators notice it, someone else sees it and reports it to the FBI.
4. You remove the child porn (based on normal moderation getting to it, or you getting notified by the person from item 3 or by the FBI).
my understanding is that Section 230 means that there is no legal liability on your part, as long as step 4 actually happens once you become aware of the content.
They've got (poorly paid and treated) human mods for user interactions, but apparently ad mods aren't a thing with them.
So I'm largely in the same camp; if they're enabling armed insurrection by white supremacists (or extremists in the middle east, etc), Facebook should be boycotted by their partners.
That's what happened with Parler. Facebook's more likely to weather the storm. Parler evidently wasn't able to.
Some open problems:
* Nazi propaganda * Content that's dangerous to the development of children (violence, eating disorders, ...) * Sexual harassment * Libel and slander
So yes, take that together with Facebooks data transfers across the Atlantic and there is a real chance of Facebook shutting down in Europe.
Facebook owns all their own infrastructure and gets the final say on how their infrastructure is used. Private companies can run themselves as they please.
If you violate the terms of your rental agreement, your landlord gets to kick you out. If you can't afford to own your own infrastructure, you answer to those who do.
Welcome to Capitalism.
Also in my country landlords can't kick renters out if they disagree politically. I think that's a good thing. Maybe similar regulation should apply to infrastructure providers.
Surely in your can get kicked out of your rental if you violate the lease. Especially if your landlord sits down with you and discusses the issues and you still can't commit to not violating your lease.
I can get evicted from my rental if I don't have renter's insurance. Let's suppose my landlord sat down with me and said: '[name], you are in violation of your lease agreement without renter's insurance.'
If my response is 'well, I'll find someone to volunteer to look for renter's insurance for me', I would expect to be evicted. And I'm not even facilitating or enabling people to openly advocate and plan for violent overthrow of a democracy on my property.
It's a little strange, then, how Amazon took Parler's money until a day after others deplatformed Parler right after the election. Amazon's decision doesn't seem as arms-length and independent as you believe.
Whether AWS was able to make that decision because of the political calculus had changed (e.g. there was demonstrable evidence of real-life violence stemming from plans made on Parler; others had taken action against Parler; AWS's employees were publicly calling for Parler to be removed from AWS) -- that's a different question.
The timing can be political but the decision apolitical.
This is ignoring that Parler's continued prior existence was likely in part due to the politics (i.e. American conservative allegations that Big Tech's pervasively censors right-wing and Republican voices).
Quoting AWS's literal rationale:
> Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. [...] This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but you plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts.
That's cool, I'm down for making all social media apps illegal. Today.
We've given guns to chimpanzees. Perhaps the human race needs to mature a little before we're shoving our entire lives into everyone else's face. Turns out that despite having more things in common than not, we still don't like each other very much.
10 years ago, most of the American left and center were shouting at banks about being the 99%. In the wake of that, these apps have been used to divide and conquer us. They've turned us against each other. Our best hope is to shun these tools en masse.
We all know what kind of people went there and even a simple Linear Regression can figure out this correlation :).
Junk I actually want to buy might be a good start.
For instance, an extra fire extinguisher on the other side of the house is probably a better purchase for most people in terms of safety. But someone might spend their "safety" budget (time, money, attention) on the armor and then be left without the basics.
Also, unless you have a gun already or you are physically strong, armor doesn't seem likely to be effective.
Exactly, body armor only helps prevent bullet penetration. Your body is still absorbing a shitload of energy. It's like being hit with a baseball bat. You have to be a large, strong person to maintain physical capabilities after being hit.
Also body armor is extremely fickle; it must be worn and fitted correctly. It is akin to a well-tailored Italian suit. If you gain a few pounds, it won't fit right. Bad fit = bad protection. Also, they don't protect the lower abdomen and groin areas -- which is a serious risk when a shooter is aiming for center mass, bullets fall as they travel.
(In the background I am just smh over how dystopian America is now.)
The same companies that make body armor for the military and police, Hesco and RMA also sell to civilians. The NIJ also helpfully provides a list on their website of all currently certified body armor that passes their test. If its NIJ certified then it is deemed acceptable for law enforcement units in the US to use it.
AR500 the company has only one product on the NIJ's CPL and its their most expensive plate and its ceramic like all real plates, not steel.
The body armor industry has a history of a lot of shady dealings and AR500 is only the latest chapter. They pay youtube gun influencers to make videos that make their products look good.
For all its faults, Facebook isn’t to blame for the existence of edgy paraphernalia merchants of the kind that make Buzzfeed feel squeamish.
Journalism like this is bullying. Ironically, Buzzfeed’s intention is to rabble rouse negative sentiment against those in charge — in this case, Zuckerberg.
Profiting off of cultural and political discord indeed. Et tu, Buzzfeed?
FB already prohibits weapons, alcohol, tobacco ads etc..
Gun manufacturers would have to KYC like banks, probably have to add big insurance costs and ultimately charge (significantly) higher prices which should hopefully reduce the amount of weapons in the US which is already ridiculously high. The tobacco playbook I'm talking European increasing costs.
the Heritage Foundation has successfully placed hundreds on the bench who rule using plain text ultra-socially conservative legal theory. Even at the justice department some of Barr's speeches especially Notre Dame one are insanely religious and scary from my side of the fence.
And abortion seems to be the main test here too.
aren't there a few cases that could go before the supreme court soon where conservatives are hoping that Barrett's quote about re-examining past rulings and not holding precedent as the 'law' will reverse our progress?
Facebook is allowed to show adverts and related links next to conpiracy theory content that just dends the readers deeper into their rabit holes.
They should be mandated to advertise educational and mental health support services next to such content.
What is happening now is like advertising best shotguns, gas ovens and sleep pills next to suicide apologetics, but on societal level.
I don't know of a lot of young people who use the platform still, they've all gone off to TikTok or Instagram(still FB I know).
Are you sure about that? When I sign on to Facebook, it appears to be social media for middle-aged liberal minded people. Facebook is a bit of a mirror in that sense.
It has become pretty good at only showing you things you like to counter the reputation of making you hate the people you know IRL, I suspect.
(It could even fall under existing restrictions on ""gangs"", if those weren't targeted at nonwhite people only!)
Engineers high-fiving each other. They got the ad relevancy right, at least.