Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube
engadget.com
engadget.com
I see adblockers as essential security tools at this point, however you dress it up one of the main functions of adtech in the present seems to be connecting literal conmen with their marks as efficiently as possible.
The FBI agrees.
> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.
That is, what we need is a rule: N scam ad impressions on my blog (even if they come from a third-party ad provider) = knock-knock from the police at my door as if I were writing scammy blog articles.
Yeah I suppose that's a certain %, the rest of it is ads from e.g. booking.com if you google "hotel california", and other not-really-scam companies. But a pie chart of "Profits made from ads from legitimate company" vs "Scammy ads" would be interesting.
Since YouTube started to take disabled tracking seriously, I guess I see what it tends to suggest to Joe Shmoe, and it's not good - not for Joe and for sure not for social cohesion.
Ironically, me saying it's Russia pushing divisive campaigns is in itself a divisive statement to make, therefore, mission successful?
No, YouTube. That guy doesn't like it and that guy doesn't like YouTube serving divisive garbage to others.
Watch in horror how in 2024, with all their AI and Algorithmic gurus, Google will serve you as top answers series and series of cloned sites. Sites run from multiple remote countries, that are literally visual replicas of the airport main website and clearly trying to impersonate the main website.
I love those scam ads. They're so entertaining. I actually try to download my favorites sometimes.
It's probably a very minor impact to Google's ad bottom line.
I'm wondering if those will be affected by the new ban as well, or if crypto scams aren't political enough to apply.
That said, part of the latter being scandalous assumes that they were actually capable of providing the service they claimed, which is something I find myself increasingly unable to believe due to how wildly badly I get categorised by the main advertising platforms — nationality, country of residence, language, gender, all wrong.
I know if I saw a paid ad for a candidate that would make me want to vote against them.
It's pretty nice in that I can throw it all straight into the recycling bin!
The most common form of political advertising by volume is probably unauthorized propaganda posters on public infrastructure, yeah. Those are annoying. Also stickers on traffic light poles and similar places.
I mostly see them on tv, public billboards and light poles.
they already cannot show ads on EU because of regulations... not that they wouldn't, but campaign managers abide to the regulations and don't go to google.
so what google does? spin it as a holier than thou campaign to try to offset the dumpster fire that is the very lucrative US campaign ads they do profit handsomely from.
"look over here, not over there". so boring.
also, their jobs site have tons of lobbyist positions on DC ;)
If the premise is that the mindset of citizens is so easily controllable that a foreign entity can do it, then why is a foreign entity's control of citizens' mindset any worse than domestic entity's control of the same? If people have no protection against the control of their mindset, then does it not follow that their minds will be controlled by _some_ entity? Isn't the game already lost at that point? And are we really discussing whom we would rather surrender our minds to?
But in a presumably democratic society, I would have thought, people would need convincing to submit to this claim.
To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny.
> If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes.
What is the instrument for measuring societal good? And what is the mechanism for acting upon those measurements? My naive understanding is that in a society that purports to be democratic, societal good is expressed through votes (people vote for things they deem to be good, or for people who promise to bring those things about), and the enactment of those measurements is done through the same mechanism.
> Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes. Now we need a mechanism that establishes the goodness of faith of the informer. And if the past five or so years have taught me anything it is that barely anyone who plays professional-league politics speaks in good faith.
If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests.
While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individual voter makes is their completely valid choice.
And honestly, lectures about how XYZ represents the voter's interest and they must vote for that candidate otherwise they're somehow "doing it wrong" is itself a class of "feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests."
When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.
I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.
For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.
I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.
But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.
At least in France there are rules regarding political spending and advertising. The basic idea is that even with an unlimited amount of money, you are not allowed to buy significantly more tv time than your opponents, campaign spending is capped etc. Since 2021 that’s what google does for France : no ads about a debate of general interest three months before an election.
On tv it’s manageable : there are not many channels, and everything is declared, at worse just have a bunch of people watch and report. I understand that google can’t deal with this automatically.
I am not saying it necessarily works well in practice, just that it’s not a new idea.
Also some tracking parameters were added on the URL. Not sure if it's from Hacker News, or from rejecting cookies, or what.
This will be an unexpected boost to their ad revenue
Whereas traditional ad agencies and TV networks require orders of magnitude more spend to get started. Those are the placements you need oligarchs friends for.
We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.
Power is a zero sum game. Banning adverts and paid media strengthens the influence of organic media like journalists, social media and podcasters.
In the US context, that might've strengthened the Trump campaign's position relative to Harris - given the higher follower counts and podcast views.
> grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.
The UK does something like this with free ad segments on linear TV at election times for major parties. However, the effectiveness has decreased with falling TV viewership.
However, there should definitely be exemptions, as political information basically just means anything that matters. I feel that ads must have a clear intention to inform, not sell, when it comes to politics.
I feel like paid, targeted ads on platforms everyone uses are extremely insidous, because an incumbent or major political party will always have more funds than an e.g. an upstart party, and targeting is generally bad as it's easy to play into people's preconceived notions that way, instead of presenting your position or the change you advocate for.
Edit: replaced "incumbent" with "incumebt or major political party"
You typically only need a few thousand well placed votes to win an election, and even 100k impressions at $10 CPM is pretty inexpensive.
In the context of the EU this isn't true though, no political system in any EU member state relies on a tiny minority of votes from some states/provinces to completely tip an election.
For example the run off thresholds in French legislative elections. And some places like Italy still use FPTP in a hybrid form.
However you're correct that there's nothing quite like Pennsylvania in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_electi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Italian_general_election#...
Based on the political ads I've seen over the years, people are better off hearing from non-paid sources.
The less noise there's for this kind of bullshit, the better. I'm really happy that every place I've lived so far doesn't have more sources of noise during elections.
I learn about the people running from different sources, journalism where I live still has some modicum of journalism and not entertainment news like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. even though they have clear biases it's quite well understood where their biases sit at, and even the most biased publications here are not overtly partisan so even when they don't align with my political views it's still interesting to read and consider the whole spectrum of opinions without those clearly pushing a distorted reality.
I really do not understand how ads are even considered as any part of the solution, at all. I'm not attacking what you said but just want to clarify it's a very alien view to my own, ads are inherently untrustworthy, they are paid, they don't suffer public scrutiny.
I rely much more on interviews of candidates, publications pro and against them (including the ones I align with that's how I decided to not vote for a candidate and pushing for another candidate of the same party a couple elections ago), and read through their policies in their official platforms.
I don't know any place where journalism is unbiased. Not saying it doesn't exist, maybe it does in some high trust society but it's definitely very rare. USA has it easy because there are only 2 parties and both have partisan media behind them. In parliamentary system with many parties though there is a problem of small ones not being heard. Ads are one solution to that. Social media/Internet in general is another. Incumbents have huge advantage in those systems because of media control, connections to journalists etc.
I agree with your latter points, not with the first one. Ads are noisy, they are not bound to be truthful and there's no pushback during an ad in case it states something obviously misleading or false.
> I don't know any place where journalism is unbiased.
I have specifically mentioned that all journalism is biased on my previous comment, I don't know how you missed it. Still if the bias is well known and the journalists are acting as journalists even under their own bias it won't be extremely partisan such as it is in the USA with Fox News and similar networks (CNN, MSNBC, etc.), given that they aren't overtly partisan I can still hold some trust even towards media that don't align with my political views because I know they are still working as journalists and not partisan hacks.
> In parliamentary system with many parties though there is a problem of small ones not being heard. Ads are one solution to that. Social media/Internet in general is another. Incumbents have huge advantage in those systems because of media control, connections to journalists etc.
There's still ample opportunity for many small parties to deliver their messages since it's well regulated, they might have access to public funding and have a more leveled playing field where money is not a barrier to entry. Ads cost money, so in an ad-infested political landscape smaller parties with little funding have even less opportunities to spread their messaging.
Again, I believe you are too coloured by your limited experience with elections, ads are a noise infested hellscape of information and shouldn't be a large part of the political discourse.
(the second article bundled with the first article, at least for me)
I'm sooooo feed up with platforms and news sites/papers knowingly starkly misrepresent the relationship of ADs and GDPR to mislead consumers and enforcement just accepting it.
I.e. they represent it as if the choice is "no-pay+ad+tracking" or "pay+no-ad+no-tracking" but that is _not_ what GDPR is about.
It's only about tracking and requires not tracking to be as easy as with tracking i.e. "no-pay+ad+tracking" vs. "no-pay+ad+no-tracking". If you want to also have a payed no-ad plan, sure go ahead, but that isn't required by GDPR nor is it _fulfilling the requirements GDPR it gives you_.
But most especially news sides require you to pay to not be spied on and also happen to then no longer show ads, which really isn't what GDPR is meant to enforce, privacy is recognized by the EU as a fundamental human right, not a luxury good you need to pay for.
But this is a good outcome for the EU nonetheless because Google is a US company and the EU is based in Europe [0]. EU and US interests don't always align, examples like Nord Stream stick out. Or the trade and tariff battles. Putting US companies in charge of EU political communication seems like insanity.
[0] My alter ego is Captain Obvious
Or if this isn't in your feed - what are you basing your estimate on?
I don't doubt there's a ton of it - but I'm curious how you know there's a ton of it.
I wonder if you had the same opinion of being prepared with cars and guns if you lived in ukraine or gaza