Gambling firm allegedly paid blogs to link new mothers to its online games
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." -Banksy
You likely come from a culture that lets pharmaceutical companies advertise on TV. You likely come from a culture that doesn't restrict fast food companies from advertising during children's programming. You likely come from a culture that doesn't force all product placement to be clearly marked with an icon on the programme.
Advertising in the UK is much more heavily regulated than in other countries. We don't believe in the right for companies to advertise whenever or wherever they like.
Gambling is fully legalised, in part so that it is easier to regulate, including regulating when and where it is advertised. There is talk from banning gambling companies from being shirt sponsors.
This is, I think, a more mature approach than banning or heavily restricting online gambling and pretending it isn't a problem.
- Ads that follow new mothers even after miscarriage [1],
- Age discrimination in employment ads [2],
- Cambridge Analytica was also mostly about targeting,
- probably many more.
Perhaps we should explore some actual transparency in the context of ad targeting.
[1]: "How to stop pregnancy ads following you after a loss" https://www.tommys.org/about-us/charity-news/how-stop-pregna...
[2]: "Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads" https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimi...
It's getting funny - in a sad, tragicomic way - to see people getting so worked up about other people having biases against them, afraid that such people being allowed to publish/speak/exist will somehow, somewhen lead to bad thing for you and yours. At the same time, people are completely ignoring that there exists a whole industry that's actively malicious, that's harming you right now - one that doesn't even hate you, but rather denies you your humanity, and cares only about extracting some money off you. If you become poor, or sick, or die in the process? This group couldn't care less.
Yes, that's the advertising industry, and associated sales and marketing cultures.
I suppose the trick is, it's hard for people to realize who's consistently screwing with their lives - with tragic outcomes such as those hinted in the comments above - when the perpetrator controls the very means people use to communicate and learn about the world.
EDIT:
It's doubly hard because this means the perpetrators are among us - among our friends, among our families, even ourselves - many whose work involves either directly or indirectly, to a greater or lesser degree, attempting to screw over innocent strangers. It shows that, the way modern economy is structured, it's really hard for anyone to be fully innocent. It's very uncomfortable to think about, even more uncomfortable to talk about. It's much easier to focus instead on hypothetical others, somewhere out there, that are out to get us.
I was going to disagree with this, but then I was opening with a disclaimer along the lines of "other than the ones green washing the oil industry, and the ones who were encouraging people to smoke long after it was known to be dangerous, and the ones working for gambling companies, and the ones selling alcohol to alcoholics".
I used to work for a big ad agency, and while I'm not aware of any projects we took on which were actively harmful to quite that degree there was definitely a general culture of not really caring about whether or not what we did was worthwhile. Several projects I worked could only be described as redistribution of money from one company to another, because we all knew they'd have no real benefit to anyone - the people being advertised at didn't want the ads, and the company being advertised for wasn't going to get any sales from them. I was explicitly told on a few occasions not to add detailed analytics because then the client would have hard numbers on how useless the campaign was.
I guess i understand the sentiment, but we shouldn't shame people away from discourse. Everyone should be allowed to be wrong, if comments are made in good faith.
My country (Japan) likely has one of the highest rates of child gambling addiction in a developed nation.
The number of times I heard "I spent all my savings on the casino haha, gotta skip some meals I guess" was ludicrous.
That was in highschool. And now I see it in middle schools. (Siblings)
I have done my part ensuring my sibling doesn't get involved in that garbage.
It's just that the generation has moved onto gacha games with systems that are even worse. They tend to be better designed and more easily accessible.
So instead we have pachinko parlors. They do not have age restrictions.
We also have gacha games which heavily push gambling and incentivise the spending of money for png images.
The are all fundamentally designed around the same psychological hooks.
Large advertising spends have pilfered a tremendous amount of pharmaceutical influence in mainstream media. So much so that much of the salary of mainstream news personalities is funded by drug companies. It has become exceptionally difficult to criticize or challenge drug companies on major tv and print outlets.
Even the USA? Prescription drug advertisements are illegal in the UK, except when aimed specifically at medical professionals. When I visit the USA, it throws me every time when I see prescription drugs advertised on prime-time TV.
The shirt sponsor ban is a pre-emptive measure so that when the goverment comes after the Premier League they can point to the fact that betting companies have been banned from sponsoring shirts. Betting promotion in the form of pitchside displays / TV ads before & during games will still be allowed.
Funny. Ads seems to absolutely everywhere in the UK. It feels very overwhelming. Reminds me of those famous crossings in New York and Tokio.
So advertisements can and are everywhere so long as they are not misleading, targeting kids or grossly offensive (I imagine)
Sure, BIG Gambling Company is bad. But the so called 'mom blogs' have no ethics and decency for doing this.
If I were a reader, I might not trust the Gambling Company but I have a relationship ( as a reader ) with the Mom Blog owner. And it's that person who has abused our relationship.
The outrage should be directed more at these women ( I assume ) who are basically predators preying on new mothers who might be at an emotionally vulnerable stage of their lives.
But when you bait/pay/bribe people to do bad things, it's surprising how many "good people" turn bad. The real perpetrator is of course the one who pays people to do bad things.
I would not be surprised to discover that these "mum blogs" were nothing if the sort.
It should be shunned but the headline kinda makes it seem like something it isn't, although correct. They aren't primarily after the blog audience but rather Google.
Several gambling firms are aggressively throwing money at the problem of trying to manipulate PageRank-like algorithms. I've seen examples of them sponsoring open source projects, ostensibly in order to purchase a link from a high ranking website.
Makes sense though when basically your entire budget goes to marketing.
They had done the sciencing and found that there are only handful of life events where a large change of behavior can be made relatively easily.
Graduation, marriage, giving birth to a child.
The angle as I see it is to sneak in through that window and make gamblers out of those young mothers permanently.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
Plus, there's plenty of mobile games that are borderline gambling, look up monopoly go, it has all the hallmarks of creating addiction/gambling loops.
Disney Puts Some ‘Frozen 2’ Promotions on Ice After Twitter Flap https://archive.is/RFsLV
From your link:
> In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission said in 2017 that influencers on social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram “should clearly and conspicuously disclose” any paid work to promote a product or service.
Sponsored posts should be clearly labeled, at the very least
Let’s say the average is 75. Lets deduct another 25 because it’s probably the same guy.
At 200$ per link (low end) thats 10k per month.
50 blog posts with each one linking to a gambling site is kind of unrealistic though. But the numbers (and the demand) is there. I am sure the actual market is in the hundreds of millions for this kind of a scheme.
And even though it is easy money, I think Google probably has a good grasp on identifying that a mommy blog is linking out to a gambling network.
Also, when I see prices mentioned, they tend to be in the $10-$50 range. But that could just be the tier my sites are in, I guess.
All that aside, it's an absolute no from me. Lie down with dogs, get fleas.
For him, the middleman, it makes no sense to start with the real offer because in his mind he is thinking, "If I go as low as possible below the baseline, I get to keep the rest.".
Yeah, it's a no from me also. I mean it would not make any sense for me to write an article like that on my site even though it is about tech. It would be like lighting a fire in my living room and asking, "What's wrong?".
Maybe it has something to do with the fact nobody reads my blog.
I'm an "easy" target in that regard.
10k for one month. Then nobody will want to read you blog anymore.
I get daily requests to put up free articles on my site and I tell these folks that I pre-screen all links, no matter what. Crypto and/or gambling? Always a hard no.
Something being "the right thing to do" is independent of whether, for you, it's something you're doing by default, or it's something cheap, or it's something requiring immense personal sacrifice. Either way, it's the right thing to do.
The way it matters in practice is that, if the society is structured so that doing the right thing is an act of great personal courage, very few people will do the right thing. If the society manages to make that cheap/free/default, nearly everyone will do the right thing. In this sense, morality is like working on stage lighting or sound during concerts, or being a sysadmin - if people can notice you doing work, you're doing it wrong.
(At least that's the more abstract take. Humans being what they are, if they don't feel recognized for their personal sacrifice, they'll just stop, as the need to belong is stronger than conscience.)
But I've seen some very impressive acts of altruism happen near me that by their sheer impact would never have gone unnoticed.
If there is no price, then morality does not function a credible signal. It's signalling, not morality, that requires making sacrifice.
Morality is cheap when one's belly is empty.
Morality is easy when one's belly is full.
The gambling companies are likely in the clear. They are allowed to advertise to everyone one (maybe over 18 which mum blogs mostly cover).
So I guess it's bad but I'm not sure which part of the chain is the weakest link. Is advertising gambling the bad thing? Maybe. Or advertising via influencers? This should certainly be more regulated.
I struggle to be outraged by people doing legal things, I'd rather think about what is wrong with the law itself.
I became convinced that bookmakers strategy was to entice those with a predilection to addiction and then take all their money.
You only live once it you think smoking improves quality and you're welling to cut down quantity. Go for it.
Anyway I disagree with this point of view because large corporations, thanks to the law are like defacto governments with a lot of power, and there needs to be something with the muscle to stand up to them (the slap on wrist fines we read about means there probably isn't enough muscle, but better than none).
Remember the large corps have all the data (the new oil) the cash (billions) and control the technology. Statistically if you temp a million people to try gambling some will get addicted there is no way to avoid this, even though you could say those that got addicted it was there own fault, and not the fault of the large corps hiding tempting messages in areas of the internet they trust.
As far as I'm concerned, probably 80 to 90% of advertising is for things that make the world worse.