Dump facebook. Make the effort. Get non-facebook contact details from anyone you want to stay in touch with. Advertise you're going to do it a few times then just pull the plug.
how do you do that? I had considered making a chrome extension to always remove the div, but instead I've just been off Facebook for a decade.
I've made one for a few months to communicate with Gen-Xers and Europeans in some special planning group here and there. Then I download and delete. Always use a new email address or new phone number for the next profile, although lately Facebook will block your account within hours if you do that, it is extremely creepy. They must be so smug that their antispam provisions coincide with their social graph vampirism.
Somebody always owns something, that's capitalism. But I would argue that Whatsapp works differently than FB, it's really just a communication tool, it doesn't manipulate you through a "feed".
And what's to say Facebook isn't harvesting all the phone numbers, contacts and the social graph and feeding it into FB and FB's ads? Especially since Whatsapp does not seem to be monetized in any way.
There’s no need to speculate on this. WhatsApp officially declared some years ago that it will share communication metadata with Facebook. So even though the message content (being E2E encrypted) isn’t shared with Facebook, everything else about one’s messages is.
The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."
Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.
I just unfollowed everyone that wasn't a close friend or family. The addictive draw is pretty much gone as I'll scroll it for 5 min every week or so and be totally caught up
I'm actually a member of several active public and private groups on Facebook where many posts have informative discussions. I rarely ever look at my newsfeed though. If I only had the newsfeed, I would have dumped Facebook long ago.
As a counterpoint, Facebook also happens to be a great tool to organize people in times like this. Just today I saw a post in my feed where some acquaintances had organized to raise money for a girl they know who was diagnosed with cancer. They managed to raise about $38,000 for her. That’s a big deal.
Yes, plenty of other tools exist. However, Facebook is the one that everyone is already on.
So if you want to raise some money for a friend who has cancer you can start a GoFundMe campaign and spread the word via email. It's going to be more work, though, and I bet you won't get as big of a response due to the friction of the medium.
I don’t know about your family, but I have only one relative on Twitter and none on Reddit. If I wanted to organize something with my family, Twitter or Reddit would be the wrong place for it.
Also I’m not sure how relevant blocking ads is to this. If it’s just about annoyance then Reddit and Twitter both have some extremely annoying aspects as well. Reddit is absolutely relentless about trying to get you to install their crappy app. Twitter is relentless about trolling external links that get too popular.
This is so nasty in multiple levels, not only targeting (ok, Facebook prefers the verb 'connecting') possibly desperate people with false medical promises but also the fact that if a user clicks on the ad, the receiving website now for sure knows of your medical condition and can do as they please with that info.
Fwiw, I always found the "Hide Ad" functionality within fb and other places working okay.
I do that for a few minutes in 5-10 ads and things get better quick.
“Last week, I posted about my breast cancer diagnosis on Facebook. Since then, my Facebook feed has featured ads for “alternative cancer care.””
In my experience, cookies and browsing history influences facebook ads more than the text in posts. For example any links sent via messenger or whatsapp or products on amazon.
Could it be the case that the authors browsing history is actually what is driving these ads? For example, if the author is an expert on pseudo science it seems natural that they would research fake cures at some point.
I am unemployed for 6 months now, and I watch YouTube from time to time, and search for all kinds of things. From a human viewer perspective, the ads were more related to my YouTube watching behaviour than my browsing history. I use DuckDuckGo but let Google Analytics see me.
Recently I decide to start doing video essays. I searched for a ton of medieval history stuff and watched a ton of related clips. I notice that YouTube began to show ads of at least 2 "I get rich from millions in debt" self-help workshops/courses to me, which I've never shown any interest in.
I have watched audio equipment review videos as well, and that's the only possible connection I can establish between the ads and my online behaviour. Are a lot of unemployed people seeking to enter audio/video making? Or are the snake oil ads showing on many people's screens because of the dire economic situation many of us are in?
I think I've scraped the bottom of the barrel of YouTube content and ads, the worst are these Japanese weight loss commercials.
How's your situation, are you still learning and pursuing your own journey? I can totally relate to the feeling of being out of work but I believe strongly that our work is a calling and we must listen to our intuition on the journey to mastery of our art.
I am learning to be an independent content producer if that's a thing. But I have family and there's constant self-imposed pressure to pursue a regularly paid job. I am juggling between job applications and making things at the moment. I guess I really need to talk to people and think it through.
Your kind words give me a lot of support I need. Thank you.
I'm sure someone will tell me why this isn't happening, but I perceive a correlation between anything I type into FB Messenger (or HN) and subsequent ads. And I mean quickly.
So, my question for you is have you been making comments or sending messages online about debt, money, wealth, etc? Then again, maybe Skynet just knows you're unemployed and that's what makes you a target for get-rich-quick.
I seldom talk about my financial status online. But I have been searching for jobs on Glassdoor and talked with people on WeChat and a few social networks in China regarding my job seeking.
Thinking that just that could make me a target of these crooks ... wow, just wow.
On large, generic platforms like Facebook and YouTube, I sense the possibility that these ads that are essentially spam can drive a much higher conversion than the legal businesses' ads, and eventually drive out other types of ads. Those are not nigeria princes asking you for "hlep", you can tell the guys behind it put in a lot of efforts and serious money, some made it like a trailer of _The Pursuit of Happyness_. There's no way Google or Facebook's AI could tell that they are suspicious schemes.
I use to not care about conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. I found it funny even, until my mother got breast cancer and some heartless guys tried to sell her lithoterapy (stone you put in water before drinking that water, stone you have to wear to sleep and all this stuff).
Well as this "therapy" was really dangerous, there were a lot of articles on the danger and that and my insistence managed to keep her from that. She has now recovered with chirugucal operation and hormone therapy.
I then followed up on that, discovered something called zététique[0], basically applying scientific method to all claims. It worked quite well for me.
Unfortunately not everyone has the support group to help them navigate through this. Or the personality to rely on a support group.
When you're in a situation like cancer you're extremely vulnerable. You think to yourself what's the point of me keeping this money if I'm just going to die so vulture companies decide to use this vulnerable state to destroy you.
As a society we should stop turning a blind eye towards this. Yes they're an adult and should know better, but maybe that view isn't always correct? Maybe sometimes adults can't consent to stuff properly because of the situation they're in.
Why should they know better? Why are adults expected to be experts in all things? Certainly if it was bad the government would stop it or they wouldn't make enough money to advertise to lowly old me is likely what most of them think.
If advertising changes consumer behaviour, as Facebook insists (to advertisers), it is quite literally killing people, by allowing these ads on their platform.
I struggle with depression and anxiety and receive a mix of ads on Facebook for various antidepressants and therapy services as well as bullshit unlicensed medical devices and other crap.
It's pretty depressing itself. I'm not going to be susceptible to these suggestions but I'm sure some desperate, suffering people are. It's sick.
I have a family member with a mental illness and they think they can talk to animals through telepathy. I was worried it was a sign of schizophrenia and tried to convince them that they needed help. Unfortunately when you google "animal telepathy" or any other query to get information on telepathic communication with animals, the top results are all absolute batshit crazy sites that confirm people can do that. Now I see how someone can start to believe all kinds of crazy things. Since Google probably optimizes for some type of engagement under the hood, all sorts of alternative medicine and crazy ideas end up as top results. I really think the whole "let's make all information/speech available with no filters except for sex because clearly sex is evil" approach from SV companies is causing huge harm. Most people don't grow up thinking they need to read several scientific, peer reviewed, reproducible papers to believe new ideas.
What result do you think google should return for "animal telepathy"? I think there just isn't any reason for "animaltelepathyisimpossible.com" to exist, and so there is nothing for google to find.
For queries that fall in the realm of "conspiracy" like alternative medicine, flat earth, telepathy, anti-vax, etc. I think results from certain "high quality" sources like Wikipedia should be weighed higher even if the content doesn't seem as relevant. For that specific example, the wikipedia article on telepathy would seem more appropriate than many of the results. There is also plenty of literature from psychology that suggests a link between belief in telepathy and certain mental illnesses, so maybe that can also be surfaced more prominently than services that claim they can talk to your dead dog. However this is not about one specific example, this is about indirectly validating false information by simply making it more accessible. On the internet a lot of conspiracies have more "social proof" (through prominence on social networks and search results) than the boring reality so they spread faster than they should.
I knew a guy that suddenly in his thirties started believing the earth was flat. His friends ignored it and tried to play it off. I tried talking to him to no avail.
One night I couldn't sleep and thought about how an average guy like him could do a 180 like that. I googled just to see what arguments the 'movement' tried to lean on. The following weeks I was bombarded with suggestions of more flat earth content, even after downvoting it YouTube kept recommending it for weeks if not months.
Who knows how many minds have been eroded already.
I worked with a guy in a position of considerable responsibility who seriously believes that reptilian aliens under the Denver airport are controlling the US government.
Sometimes I wonder if there's a parallel between how neurons interact during psychosis and how human minds interact over the internet under conditions of manipulation for engagement. Maybe in both cases, there's some damping/attentional mechanism that is missing/not functioning.
I think we're just regressing to the mean. Throughout most or all of human history we believed all kinds of crazy ideas, and it wasn't until very recently that we started really valuing teaching the scientific method and good education mostly based on facts. This required filtering lots of information and putting a lot of trust in many institutions. This worked extremely well right up until the internet became mainstream. Now unfiltered information is available everywhere again, and a significant portion of the population have a hard time distinguishing what is real or not. I grew up religious so I very well understand how for many (maybe most) the burden of proof is simply that it is written down somewhere. Of course the institutions aren't blameless here, and I don't know how to solve this without all the major SV companies agreeing to lose a lot of money.
By the way, don't overestimate the influence of suggestion. Someone who believes in telepathy may simply have experienced it[1] and therefore, as they say, you won't talk them out of what they weren't talked in to.
[1]I'm not implying it's real, just that people experience it exactly as they do real things, like hearing voices.
This kind of thing can happen even if the search engine doesn't optimize for engagement. If we search for something that the alternative medicine people talk about much more often than the reputable sources do then naturally many of the top search results will be from the alternative medicine crowd.
I've noticed this kind of thing happening for search terms related to thyroid hormone testing. For example, if you search for "thyroxine"[1] the top search results are from reputable sources such as the Endorcine Society or WebMD. However, if you search for "reverse T3"[2] -- an esoteric test favored by the alternative medicine crowd -- then most of the top results are from naturopaths, herbal supplement peddlers, etc.
Is non-verbal communication with an animal too crazy of an idea for you? Because animals don't speak or obey (looking at you cat) humans too well but can sense things and act on that information.
From there animal telepathy isn't too far of a stretch for someone to make.
I haven't seen scientific proof and I don't think anyone has. But I would still expect others would make sites and claims.
But you feel there is a harm in there. Because it is reenforcing what a mental ill person believes.
I'm not sure what the best compromise is. The core problem is the fact that there are communities who want to talk about animal telepathy doesn't work with your worldview. Asking sv to exclude them makes the web a smaller more corporate place. I'm not sure that's the best approach.
In your situation you need a censored google. A google to match your worldview. In fairness google has been trying to show you you-centric search results if you are logged in. In your case this is a one-time transaction so history wouldn't place a factor.
But I come back to why is this a sv problem? The root of the problem is your family member isn't taking his medicine or it is not working or he is right and you won't listen.
If I had a family member like that I would just go along with it. Things don't need to be 100% correct in life. People need to believe in something. No harm here.
The problem here is that false information spreads quickly and is validated though sites like Google and Facebook through higher exposure. This has real consequences like the rise of anti-vaxers and other anti-science movements.
There are areas now facebook and google doesn't service like hacking/cracking sites but those sites still exist.
When you try to hide information and the person discovers the truth it becomes so much more powerful because you are telling them this is forbidden knowledge that only a few have heard exists, you were right.
Before facebook, anti-vaccine sentiment mostly spread through newspapers and TV. There were big scares, but they were only ignited after at least some "experts" found the anti-vaccine argument credibe, and public sentiment could be restored by the same experts declaring it safe. So the threshold for irrational/gossip-driven antivax sentiment was far higher, and mitigation was far easier.
See, for instance, the UK pertussis vaccine scare and whooping cough epidemic in the 1970s... [1]
Wouldn't it be nice if facebook took proper responsibility for what they publish in exchange for money.
When snake-oil damages someone when it was advertised by facebook, facebook, who took the money to diseminate the harm are liable for that.
The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that. Unless you are selling snake-oil, it would seem internet advertising is something to avoid.
I think if everyone had to take direct responsibility for the advertising they publish, quality newspapers would be more profitable and facebook & google very, very much less dominant. Would it make the world a nicer, kinder place? Dunno. I say it's worth running the experiment.
> The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that.
How Tesla, for example, did it is a separate question relevant to marketing in general and the analysis will be complex.
Relevant here is that it is a fact that they did it paying facebook (& google etc.) absoutely nothing and have clearly been wildly, amazingly successful.
Do something newsworthy and facebook will advertise you for free. The goal is to get bloggers/news orgs to write something about your product. Then user's will share those articles for free
They don't do ads per se, but do spend quite a lot in other forms of marketing -- Discounts & perks for referrals, high-quality press photos, events, livestreams, etc.
I think it's unrealistic to expect publishers to vet advertisements - all the "hur dur ads evil must ban" stuff aside - it would be nice if there was a good way to incentivise the publishers to do the right thing while being realistic about what they can do and that ads are here to stay - I'm not sure what. Technically it looks like a thing where an AI could do a 80% of the way there job - and with a human layer of sanity checks on top of it should be realistic - but still don't see a way to structure the incentives - this would cost a bunch of money and realistically do very little for FB (maybe prevent some bad PR from people getting scammed but TBH a lot of people won't even recognise they got scammed)
It's perfectly realistic. You legally mandate it and they change their business practises. You think facebook and google would actually be unviable if they had to decide weather to publish an ad when they take the money? I doubt that strongly. Less profitable, sure. Less competitive in advertising with the newspaper, yep. Smaller players would be more competitive, absolutely.
But even if they were unviable, someone else would work out how to set up a competing viable business with those constraints. Do you really doubt that? And perhaps if facebook can't be viable without advertising evil, destructive propaganda killing people who are mentally weakened by serious disease, they, you know, shouldn't be operating? Just a thought.
Oh and "hur dur" yourself, man. Not productive to a rational and sensible discussion, yeah?
How are you even supposed to determine what is fraudulent advertising as a publisher ? Are you supposed to inspect every product or verify the existence of every event before accepting a campaign ? This would basically wipe out the option to run small/local campaigns because of the upfront costs.
And how would this benefit small players ? Their campaigns are smaller so as a % the flat cost of verification is going to be a significant price hike. Are they in a better position to verify that the ads they are running are not fraudulent ? And how would they cover their risk exposure considering a few missed fraudulent ads could put them out of business entirely compared to a large market player ?
It would have radical consequences to a huge industry and it sounds like a knee jerk reaction because you don't like ads.
Run the ad in your local newspaper. When you place the ad they look at it and say "well that isn't obviously snake-oil"
If it turns out that it was snake oil in disguise, the defence of that not being obvious to a reasonable person is a thing. You know much the same way the genocidal maniacs can't advertise genocidial mania in the new york times. Or your local newspaper. Is that ok on facebook or do they actually stop that? If they don't they probably should. If they do then they should keep doing it and extend to snake-oil frauds and such like.
It benefits the small players as the cost reduction to google and facebook from the sheer scale of not vetting anything much is diminished encouraging publishers to run their own ads rather than outsource to the huge players with all the associated problems with that. (e.g. just one aspect, How can your advertising startup possibly compete with google given the status quo? With a diminished advantage of scale you have a better chance of setting up your advertising company in some particular niche or other).
Beyond that I have no issue with small, local internet advertising being more expensive - if that even is the outcome, which I'm not convinced about. So running a small, local campaign pushes people and their advertising spend to local non-internet campaigns? I'm completely fine with that. I think that is a good thing, myself.
More competition for advertising spend is a very, very good thing, in my view. For so many reasons. Censorship mitigation among them. A wouldn't publish the ad, B was unsure, but C said it was ok so I went there. Better than FB said no on a whim so now I can't advertise competitively.
See, sensible discussion. I don't require you or anyone to agree with me. Just be civil, and not put words into others mouths they did not say e.g. "...because you don't like ads"
> it would be nice if there was a good way to incentivise the publishers to do the right thing while being realistic about what they can do and that ads are here to stay
Fine the publisher every time they publish something fraudulent. It's not the public's problem or responsibility to solve this for Facebook.
This seems like a particularly egregious aspect of a larger problem; that we allow medical advertising at all. From what I understand some of European countries don't allow advertising for legitimate medicines, let alone snakeoil. That makes a lot of sense to me; the ads for legitimate medicines all seem emotionally manipulative; designed to make people pressure their doctors into writing subscriptions they might not actually need. If facebook adopted a strict "no medicine" policy, they wouldn't have to sort the wheat from the chaff.
While not nearly as bad as what is in the article. Predictive text in Messages on iOS now suggests "cancer" when I type "can" and "chemotheteropy" when I type "ch". And to really rub it in "ma" brings up "magnesium". The magnesium one being the worst because if I type it that means they are doing a magnesium infusion and that means I am going to feel like I have been hit by a truck for the next two days.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
I get that this is frustrating and deeply annoying for you, but these predictions are analyzed and made on-device. There is no tracking going on like in the case of Facebook (where it could leak through another Cambridge-Analytica-like event to many other companies).
Sometimes when I'm planning to buy something. I'm sure I haven't searched about them, and just talked with my friend verbally. Few hours later, ads shows in my feeds. I ask my friend about this, many of them confirm and still don't know what happened.
I've seen instances of this before, but never one that couldn't possibly be explained in any other way. For example, getting an ad for an HBO show that I talked about. Well, HBO is pushing said show among my demographic, could easily be a coincidence.
I started getting tons of ads for elder law immediately after I started watching Better Call Saul. I watched them on VLC on Arch Linux and _acquired_ the files over a year earlier. I hadn't Googled it, visited any related pages or posted about watching it. A little while after I uninstalled the Facebook app they stopped.
I was very much on the "there must be another explanation" train, especially since it should be possible to notice a ton of bandwidth if they were streaming conversation audio.
But I've really never been able to figure that one out. If you've got an explanation for me I'd be really interested.
What if your friend happened to search for that item afterwards? And FB made the connection because you were friends and it detected that your locations were in close proximity.
> But I’ve witnessed the false promises of these companies. I’ve spoken to someone who flew to that beach clinic, only to return home and discover that her tumor was inoperable. The evidence is clear: Death rates are much higher for people with cancer who choose alternative therapies instead of standard care.
I wondered if Facebook etc might have any liability here. But no, they don't, under US law.[0] Maybe they should, however.
I recently deleted Facebook from my phone, and convinced my wife to do the same. We still have our accounts, but will only access FB via a web browser. Getting off WhatsApp will prove trickier, because we both have relatives overseas.
This is the perspective of a recent diagnosis, and someone with privileged healthcare. While I completely, very tangibly, empathize with much of the article (especially isolated treatment & urgent care), it is attacking the wrong thing.
Inadequate healthcare is the real problem. It is foundational. That fact that these companies exist is a problem, yet really we need to focus on the fact that social media and alternative care is the only "welcoming" experience for so many who either can't afford, or who can, & meet critical treatment with a slap of reality and a world of so much uncertainty and direction that THEY ultimately have to navigate with only the general guidance of whoever's care they land in.
"Delete Facebook" ... no, I disagree. Embrace social-care and find others in similar situations.
If I'm feeling a little sick and decide to look up the symptoms, half the results are "alternative cures" that involve drinking olive oil, applying tea tree oil, drinking green tea (I think these people think tea tree and tea tea are the same) and BOOM cured. Just this week I was looking up a couple animal videos, and Youtube's sidebar recommendations were absolutely full of "natural cures" for various pet ailments. Of course, every single one mentioned olive oil in the title.
I can't even look up basic recipes or info about specific ingredients or even simple gardening info without half the results being things like spinach being some miracle food that helps treat/cure syphilis and cancer.
I'm sick of it. I'm not exactly in favor of deplatforming, but these people are spreading actively dangerous and outright wrong information. And for what? I know there are people out there seeking to profit by selling fake cures, but there are people out there legitimately saying you should just go to the store and buy olive oil (and it's always olive oil) and eat a few oranges and your diseases will go away--they don't get any direct benefit from the deception. WHY are there so many people out there saying this bizarre shit?
The take on Facebook profiting from the advertising of deplorable pseudoscience is interesting, and this is a good story, but what struck me was the idea that the author recognized that they were being manipulated when these ads appeared.
What is interesting to me is that they did not believe they were being manipulated and lied to before.
Not that this excuses it, but I wonder if it had anything to do with his FB post versus remarketing. My suspicion is that, following his diagnouses, he visited a website that is being a bit shady with its userlists.
90 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] thread'Options' from your browser's extensions settings > 'Filter Lists' tab > 'Annoyances' about 1/2 way down.
Gets rid of many soft paywalls too.
Life is significantly better without it. Really.
I've made one for a few months to communicate with Gen-Xers and Europeans in some special planning group here and there. Then I download and delete. Always use a new email address or new phone number for the next profile, although lately Facebook will block your account within hours if you do that, it is extremely creepy. They must be so smug that their antispam provisions coincide with their social graph vampirism.
The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."
Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.
I don't miss it.
So if you want to raise some money for a friend who has cancer you can start a GoFundMe campaign and spread the word via email. It's going to be more work, though, and I bet you won't get as big of a response due to the friction of the medium.
In all those cases, you can block ads. On Facebook, you can't. The arms race between Facebook and adblockers seems to be in Facebook's favor.
Also I’m not sure how relevant blocking ads is to this. If it’s just about annoyance then Reddit and Twitter both have some extremely annoying aspects as well. Reddit is absolutely relentless about trying to get you to install their crappy app. Twitter is relentless about trolling external links that get too popular.
Cancer patients need compassion and listening instead.
In my experience, cookies and browsing history influences facebook ads more than the text in posts. For example any links sent via messenger or whatsapp or products on amazon.
Could it be the case that the authors browsing history is actually what is driving these ads? For example, if the author is an expert on pseudo science it seems natural that they would research fake cures at some point.
Recently I decide to start doing video essays. I searched for a ton of medieval history stuff and watched a ton of related clips. I notice that YouTube began to show ads of at least 2 "I get rich from millions in debt" self-help workshops/courses to me, which I've never shown any interest in.
I have watched audio equipment review videos as well, and that's the only possible connection I can establish between the ads and my online behaviour. Are a lot of unemployed people seeking to enter audio/video making? Or are the snake oil ads showing on many people's screens because of the dire economic situation many of us are in?
How's your situation, are you still learning and pursuing your own journey? I can totally relate to the feeling of being out of work but I believe strongly that our work is a calling and we must listen to our intuition on the journey to mastery of our art.
I am learning to be an independent content producer if that's a thing. But I have family and there's constant self-imposed pressure to pursue a regularly paid job. I am juggling between job applications and making things at the moment. I guess I really need to talk to people and think it through.
Your kind words give me a lot of support I need. Thank you.
So, my question for you is have you been making comments or sending messages online about debt, money, wealth, etc? Then again, maybe Skynet just knows you're unemployed and that's what makes you a target for get-rich-quick.
Thinking that just that could make me a target of these crooks ... wow, just wow.
On large, generic platforms like Facebook and YouTube, I sense the possibility that these ads that are essentially spam can drive a much higher conversion than the legal businesses' ads, and eventually drive out other types of ads. Those are not nigeria princes asking you for "hlep", you can tell the guys behind it put in a lot of efforts and serious money, some made it like a trailer of _The Pursuit of Happyness_. There's no way Google or Facebook's AI could tell that they are suspicious schemes.
Well as this "therapy" was really dangerous, there were a lot of articles on the danger and that and my insistence managed to keep her from that. She has now recovered with chirugucal operation and hormone therapy.
I then followed up on that, discovered something called zététique[0], basically applying scientific method to all claims. It worked quite well for me.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%A9t%C3%A9tique
When you're in a situation like cancer you're extremely vulnerable. You think to yourself what's the point of me keeping this money if I'm just going to die so vulture companies decide to use this vulnerable state to destroy you.
As a society we should stop turning a blind eye towards this. Yes they're an adult and should know better, but maybe that view isn't always correct? Maybe sometimes adults can't consent to stuff properly because of the situation they're in.
Why should they know better? Why are adults expected to be experts in all things? Certainly if it was bad the government would stop it or they wouldn't make enough money to advertise to lowly old me is likely what most of them think.
It's pretty depressing itself. I'm not going to be susceptible to these suggestions but I'm sure some desperate, suffering people are. It's sick.
One night I couldn't sleep and thought about how an average guy like him could do a 180 like that. I googled just to see what arguments the 'movement' tried to lean on. The following weeks I was bombarded with suggestions of more flat earth content, even after downvoting it YouTube kept recommending it for weeks if not months.
Who knows how many minds have been eroded already.
[1]I'm not implying it's real, just that people experience it exactly as they do real things, like hearing voices.
I've noticed this kind of thing happening for search terms related to thyroid hormone testing. For example, if you search for "thyroxine"[1] the top search results are from reputable sources such as the Endorcine Society or WebMD. However, if you search for "reverse T3"[2] -- an esoteric test favored by the alternative medicine crowd -- then most of the top results are from naturopaths, herbal supplement peddlers, etc.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thyroxine [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reverse+T3
From there animal telepathy isn't too far of a stretch for someone to make.
I haven't seen scientific proof and I don't think anyone has. But I would still expect others would make sites and claims.
But you feel there is a harm in there. Because it is reenforcing what a mental ill person believes.
I'm not sure what the best compromise is. The core problem is the fact that there are communities who want to talk about animal telepathy doesn't work with your worldview. Asking sv to exclude them makes the web a smaller more corporate place. I'm not sure that's the best approach.
In your situation you need a censored google. A google to match your worldview. In fairness google has been trying to show you you-centric search results if you are logged in. In your case this is a one-time transaction so history wouldn't place a factor.
But I come back to why is this a sv problem? The root of the problem is your family member isn't taking his medicine or it is not working or he is right and you won't listen.
If I had a family member like that I would just go along with it. Things don't need to be 100% correct in life. People need to believe in something. No harm here.
There are areas now facebook and google doesn't service like hacking/cracking sites but those sites still exist.
When you try to hide information and the person discovers the truth it becomes so much more powerful because you are telling them this is forbidden knowledge that only a few have heard exists, you were right.
See, for instance, the UK pertussis vaccine scare and whooping cough epidemic in the 1970s... [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#UK,_pertussi...
And they’ll be sending you that stuff and then saying “If only he’d tried...” as they lower your casket.
When snake-oil damages someone when it was advertised by facebook, facebook, who took the money to diseminate the harm are liable for that.
The other thing worth noting is that the hugely successful internet advertising campaigns, eg Tesla, who have a brand now comparable to Mercedes, paid facebook, google et al. precisely $0 to achieve that. Unless you are selling snake-oil, it would seem internet advertising is something to avoid.
I think if everyone had to take direct responsibility for the advertising they publish, quality newspapers would be more profitable and facebook & google very, very much less dominant. Would it make the world a nicer, kinder place? Dunno. I say it's worth running the experiment.
How?
Relevant here is that it is a fact that they did it paying facebook (& google etc.) absoutely nothing and have clearly been wildly, amazingly successful.
But even if they were unviable, someone else would work out how to set up a competing viable business with those constraints. Do you really doubt that? And perhaps if facebook can't be viable without advertising evil, destructive propaganda killing people who are mentally weakened by serious disease, they, you know, shouldn't be operating? Just a thought.
Oh and "hur dur" yourself, man. Not productive to a rational and sensible discussion, yeah?
How are you even supposed to determine what is fraudulent advertising as a publisher ? Are you supposed to inspect every product or verify the existence of every event before accepting a campaign ? This would basically wipe out the option to run small/local campaigns because of the upfront costs.
And how would this benefit small players ? Their campaigns are smaller so as a % the flat cost of verification is going to be a significant price hike. Are they in a better position to verify that the ads they are running are not fraudulent ? And how would they cover their risk exposure considering a few missed fraudulent ads could put them out of business entirely compared to a large market player ?
It would have radical consequences to a huge industry and it sounds like a knee jerk reaction because you don't like ads.
If it turns out that it was snake oil in disguise, the defence of that not being obvious to a reasonable person is a thing. You know much the same way the genocidal maniacs can't advertise genocidial mania in the new york times. Or your local newspaper. Is that ok on facebook or do they actually stop that? If they don't they probably should. If they do then they should keep doing it and extend to snake-oil frauds and such like.
It benefits the small players as the cost reduction to google and facebook from the sheer scale of not vetting anything much is diminished encouraging publishers to run their own ads rather than outsource to the huge players with all the associated problems with that. (e.g. just one aspect, How can your advertising startup possibly compete with google given the status quo? With a diminished advantage of scale you have a better chance of setting up your advertising company in some particular niche or other).
Beyond that I have no issue with small, local internet advertising being more expensive - if that even is the outcome, which I'm not convinced about. So running a small, local campaign pushes people and their advertising spend to local non-internet campaigns? I'm completely fine with that. I think that is a good thing, myself.
More competition for advertising spend is a very, very good thing, in my view. For so many reasons. Censorship mitigation among them. A wouldn't publish the ad, B was unsure, but C said it was ok so I went there. Better than FB said no on a whim so now I can't advertise competitively.
See, sensible discussion. I don't require you or anyone to agree with me. Just be civil, and not put words into others mouths they did not say e.g. "...because you don't like ads"
Fine the publisher every time they publish something fraudulent. It's not the public's problem or responsibility to solve this for Facebook.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
I was very much on the "there must be another explanation" train, especially since it should be possible to notice a ton of bandwidth if they were streaming conversation audio.
But I've really never been able to figure that one out. If you've got an explanation for me I'd be really interested.
I wondered if Facebook etc might have any liability here. But no, they don't, under US law.[0] Maybe they should, however.
0) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/54
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771585
Any other suggestions would be helpful!
Inadequate healthcare is the real problem. It is foundational. That fact that these companies exist is a problem, yet really we need to focus on the fact that social media and alternative care is the only "welcoming" experience for so many who either can't afford, or who can, & meet critical treatment with a slap of reality and a world of so much uncertainty and direction that THEY ultimately have to navigate with only the general guidance of whoever's care they land in.
"Delete Facebook" ... no, I disagree. Embrace social-care and find others in similar situations.
If I'm feeling a little sick and decide to look up the symptoms, half the results are "alternative cures" that involve drinking olive oil, applying tea tree oil, drinking green tea (I think these people think tea tree and tea tea are the same) and BOOM cured. Just this week I was looking up a couple animal videos, and Youtube's sidebar recommendations were absolutely full of "natural cures" for various pet ailments. Of course, every single one mentioned olive oil in the title.
I can't even look up basic recipes or info about specific ingredients or even simple gardening info without half the results being things like spinach being some miracle food that helps treat/cure syphilis and cancer.
I'm sick of it. I'm not exactly in favor of deplatforming, but these people are spreading actively dangerous and outright wrong information. And for what? I know there are people out there seeking to profit by selling fake cures, but there are people out there legitimately saying you should just go to the store and buy olive oil (and it's always olive oil) and eat a few oranges and your diseases will go away--they don't get any direct benefit from the deception. WHY are there so many people out there saying this bizarre shit?
What is interesting to me is that they did not believe they were being manipulated and lied to before.