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.
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.
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).
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.
The simplest solution might be privacy protections, which (among other things) would indirectly kneecap targeted content curation, due to a lack of data.
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.)
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.