Normally I don't stoop to ad-hominem, but we are talking about an indicted felon who was impeached by his own party. Without context you might mistake it for a serious lawsuit.
Better but still not quite right. Paxton was acquitted of all counts in the Texas Senate and remains in his post.
The suing of a presidential admin by a state AG says very little about the merits of the lawsuit. Pointing it out as a reason to dismiss the legitimacy of a suit stains your reply with obvious bias against conservative policy.
There are plenty of reasons to not like Paxton. Suing POTUS is not high on the list.
> Pointing it out as a reason to dismiss the legitimacy of a suit stains your reply with obvious bias against conservative policy.
No, it's pointing out that no serious person could level 50 individual suits against the state and meaningfully progress them all. I align myself with conservative and liberal politicians that represent meaningful changes in policy; this is not it. A cursory look at this guy's history will clearly show that he's a republican reactionary, not a conservative.
Yes, this article is apparently so worthwhile that that whole tribe of political hacks has gone into action trying to censor it. It doesn't seem that hard hitting to me, but well, fragile egos and all that.
Sure. But do you want to be known as the guy who hangs out a bunch of pedophiles? Man that'd really make you popular at kid's parties with all the parents right? But just hanging out where the pedos are doesn't mean an endorsement.
Is it how humans think? Or is it just media trying to create drama out of nothing?
Most of the people who get exposed to extremist content without looking for it will surely not even register the ads around that content. An IBM ad cannot possibly be as noticeable as that.
And, of course, the real problem is the presence of said content, not it's placement among ads. Manufactured drama like the one we're looking at here only detracts us from taking about what is really important.
LITERALLY marketing is all about creating associations and perception. That is basically marketing's entire purpose for existing. So to say "well its only media that creates an association because of XXXXXX" sure! Because that is marketing. Thus marketing in a nazi filled content site makes your marketing associate you witrh nazis!
Every movie of a dystopian society shows some ads in bloody places, you don't think "man, I wonder if that company really just meant to sell workout equipment, and in no way related to the purge happening below the billboard in that area all the time". Again, its just not how we work.
There's a vast difference between saying "I live in a neighborhood that has a nazi in it" and "i actively go and spend my money at a bar that is known for making it easier for nazis to hang out there and harass customers"
I'm no adtech expert but I suspect that potential customers would form mental associations between two things that often show up together, like pro-Nazi content and the ads I'm sponsoring, and I wouldn't want that.
Yeah, right, they see Apple's ads 24/7 in all kinds of mediums, and alonside 100000 tweets of all persuassions, but it's the 100 tweets most wont even ever see, unless they follow those people, that they'll make associations with the brand...
Come on. No mainstream brand wants to be even remotely associated with this content. Merely appearing on the same screen as content that “touts Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party” is enough of an association to tarnish a brand. If you don’t believe this, start and invest in a wholesome brand and then advertise on Stormfront. This is Marketing 101.
> During all of this Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts. Yaccarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content.”
It seems the company knows that this stuff is on there and is paying lip service to protecting brands from it.
Apple with its white laptops is racist same way building white buildings in hot climates is racist. Not that it has to do with cooling and energy conservation...
It occurs to me I haven't actually seen an Apple product outside of protective cases in years. They've added a lot of silver to the mix. I was thinking mostly of those white monitors everybody goes for in their minimalist-aesthetic offices.
>Come on. No mainstream brand wants to be even remotely associated with this content.
Come on. Mainstream brands would not care less if activist idiots didn't make a fuss about them appearing together (to use the negative PR to force their censorship upon the medium blackmailing it through the advertisers). If those activists cared about the Nazi tweet, and not for controlling the medium, they'd take offense to it alone, not in relation to whomever ads happen to be shown at the time.
> use the negative PR to force their censorship upon the medium blackmailing it through the advertisers
It's not blackmail if these companies didn't consider the content disagreeable in the first place. Turns out a lot of companies want to save face at any cost, and they will abandon your platform the moment it deviates from their values. If you didn't expect this from Apple, IBM and Oracle, you must have been on vacation when advertisers did this on YouTube: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38965377
> Would the ads be contaminated by being in close promitity to unrelated to them ads?
Ads on Twitter are almost indistinguishable from tweets that they require a triple take to notice that they are ads, so yes very much so?
Even IRL ad and billboard placement decides how much demand you get and how much you can charge for ads. But here the ad is not even visibly separate from context. The ad literally becomes product placement. Imagine you were reading Mein Kampf and there was an ad for IBM disguised for part of the book.
For Musk's new Twitter to be successful would require this radical content to be so mainstream and accepted that advertisers are genuinely not worried about such a scenario because if you're an ad company like Twitter/Google/Meta/etc then ad placement is your biz.
Twitter's previous way of appealing to big advertisers was delicate public image and bland content moderation policy but Musk apparently thinks he is Trump level business genius that would free Twitter from burning money by political posturing.
Ideology is in the eyes of the beholder, not in the product or personal. Maybe you expect the beholder is perfectly informed, can distinguish an ad from a tweet in 3 ms and can override a million years of evolution through sheer will making neurons that fire together not wire together, but advertisers probably don't. And guess what they are the ones who got the money
By the way, you really just compared being Republican or Democrat to being a Nazi or antisemite?
In a different universe with Musk actually being the hero some people think he is, this would be a fantastic argument to get behind. Hey advertisers, we are a content-neutral pipeline. Your ads are only showing up next to this type of content for people who deliberately set out to view that content. We believe in principled free speech, and people's right to say this despicable stuff so that it can be soundly rejected in the public sphere. We hope you'll continue to do business with us, and support the American ideals of freedom, but if not there are plenty of other websites to advertise on. However back in this universe, the most sympathetic interpretation of events is that Musk has a debilitating social media addiction causing him to regress to the adolescent edgelord phase. And so the argument that the site is a content-neutral conduit falls completely flat when the chief forum admin is spending his time personally boosting the vile content!
Interesting that Media Matter is trying to double-down on this. Seems non-profits might be even more corrupt than for-profit companies.
It's clearly a weak argument, and why are they focusing on X only when they could expand their criticism to the many other social media news feeds. The pants are sagging and the bias is showing.
I don’t see anything particularly corrupt about mediamatters. Just the normal baseline level of corruption one sees in US politics where corruption has been legalized.
It’s just a blatantly partisan operation mostly dedicated to criticism of conservative media with close ties to the Democratic Party and the Clintons.
If anything I’m more critical of the SLAPP free speech advocate Elon issued against Media Matters, and Ken Paxton using his power to direct government resources towards a partisan investigation of Media Matters in response to this drama. These BOTH strike me as more corrupt than Media Matters pointing out what posts are appearing by what ads to put pressure on advertisers to cut their ties with Twitter. If anything Musk and Paxton are helping media matters look squeaky clean by contrast.
This "non profit" is a partisan political organizaton whose purpose is to undermine anyone who disagrees with their far left worldview. For decades they have been playing dirty tricks to demonetize and cancel anyone of prominence who doesn't actively toe their far left line. It's not clear why anyone pays any attention to them anymore.
The mental gymnastics people are making to somehow kowtow to Elon really amaze me. “Who cares if my ad runs over Nazi twitter!” Really? That’s what you’re going with?
I'm seeing multiple examples of it in this thread at the time of writing! It's baffling. Do they not know how humans brain generally work or are they just being willfully dishonest?
It's just human nature to be biased toward the thing that supports your view. It's actually more blatant in you than most people in this thread.
Your 3 comments:
> I'm no adtech expert but <insert something you want to be true to validate your opinion, despite not knowing if it's true>
> Were ads being placed... at the same rate
Again, you have no idea what the answer is here. But you clearly think it supports what you believe.
> Do they not know how humans brain generally work..
A lot of assumptions baked in here that, what do you know, support your own biases. Your a self-admitted non-expert in adtech, but in the course of 3 comments it's suddenly so baffling that people can't see what is so obvious
In other words, HN is full of humans, just like you.
Seeing a lot of comments here already that don't know what "brand safety" is.
We've lived in a time where many media platforms were burning VC money and that brand safety wasn't as important. Now we're seeing everything converge back to middle-of-the-road, inoffensive content due to the reliance on advertising.
Articles like this is how you get things like YouTube where even a single swear word in the middle of your video gets it demonitized. I wish brands would be less conservative about potential edge cases of where they show up and I wish journalists would stop painting these edge cases as being what is happening 100% of the time.
It's also useful to understand the origin of Media Matters and know a little about its founder, David Brock. He's a lifetime "dirty tricks" political agent who by his own admission in his 2002 memoir has knowingly and repeatedly put not just misleading statements but outright lies in print before.
Elon Musk also has a record making misleading statements and in some cases outright lies, but what's under discussion is the observable behavior of the platform which leaves behind a wealth of empirical evidence; logs, humans in the loop, third party caching and scraping, etc.
If the outcome of this case becomes available to a prediction market, I would bet 10:1 against Media Matters prevailing absent a full retraction and apology which leads to the suit being dropped.
> I think the complaint is worth reading, not because everything in it has already been proven true,
I think its worth reading, because it claims things are false and then describes how they are literally true, if perhaps incomplete.
If you know even a little of the applicable law, its also worth reading for entertainment value because its shockingly bad even beyond directly undermining its own falsity claims. There's a lot to go into about how bad, but the crowning bit of absolute failure is that it names two defendants—Media Matters and Eric Hanonoki—but then fails to even mention any allegations against Hanonoki in any of its causes of action (he is mentioned only in footnotes past the “Jurisdiction and Venue” section.)
Is this your opinion as an attorney who is licensed to practice in Texas and has tried cases in this district before or are you speaking as a layperson?
As a layperson I might agree with you, but in these sorts of cases the judges tend to play a pivotal role, as do both the economic power of the plaintiff and the existing reputation of the defendants.
Many any engineer has been run aground by privileging the predictive power of their own literal interpretation over the case law and disposition of the actual judges.
The article doesn't say the issue is the rate is higher, just that they are shown next to a pro-Nazi post. I've seen pro-Nazi and similarly gross posts pre-Musk so either the companies didn't care back then or the article is lacking on the real reason.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/tech/elon-musk-texas-lawsuit-...
> He has sued president Joe Biden's administration nearly 50 times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Paxton
The suing of a presidential admin by a state AG says very little about the merits of the lawsuit. Pointing it out as a reason to dismiss the legitimacy of a suit stains your reply with obvious bias against conservative policy.
There are plenty of reasons to not like Paxton. Suing POTUS is not high on the list.
No, it's pointing out that no serious person could level 50 individual suits against the state and meaningfully progress them all. I align myself with conservative and liberal politicians that represent meaningful changes in policy; this is not it. A cursory look at this guy's history will clearly show that he's a republican reactionary, not a conservative.
Point is. It's not how humans think.
Most of the people who get exposed to extremist content without looking for it will surely not even register the ads around that content. An IBM ad cannot possibly be as noticeable as that.
And, of course, the real problem is the presence of said content, not it's placement among ads. Manufactured drama like the one we're looking at here only detracts us from taking about what is really important.
Every movie of a dystopian society shows some ads in bloody places, you don't think "man, I wonder if that company really just meant to sell workout equipment, and in no way related to the purge happening below the billboard in that area all the time". Again, its just not how we work.
There's a vast difference between saying "I live in a neighborhood that has a nazi in it" and "i actively go and spend my money at a bar that is known for making it easier for nazis to hang out there and harass customers"
This charade is used since the dawn of internet to police media and social media outlets using advertising boycotts.
> During all of this Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts. Yaccarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content.”
It seems the company knows that this stuff is on there and is paying lip service to protecting brands from it.
Apple's wholesome lineup of all-white products is right in line with Nazi ideology.
Come on. Mainstream brands would not care less if activist idiots didn't make a fuss about them appearing together (to use the negative PR to force their censorship upon the medium blackmailing it through the advertisers). If those activists cared about the Nazi tweet, and not for controlling the medium, they'd take offense to it alone, not in relation to whomever ads happen to be shown at the time.
It's not blackmail if these companies didn't consider the content disagreeable in the first place. Turns out a lot of companies want to save face at any cost, and they will abandon your platform the moment it deviates from their values. If you didn't expect this from Apple, IBM and Oracle, you must have been on vacation when advertisers did this on YouTube: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38965377
Ads on Twitter are almost indistinguishable from tweets that they require a triple take to notice that they are ads, so yes very much so?
Even IRL ad and billboard placement decides how much demand you get and how much you can charge for ads. But here the ad is not even visibly separate from context. The ad literally becomes product placement. Imagine you were reading Mein Kampf and there was an ad for IBM disguised for part of the book.
For Musk's new Twitter to be successful would require this radical content to be so mainstream and accepted that advertisers are genuinely not worried about such a scenario because if you're an ad company like Twitter/Google/Meta/etc then ad placement is your biz.
Twitter's previous way of appealing to big advertisers was delicate public image and bland content moderation policy but Musk apparently thinks he is Trump level business genius that would free Twitter from burning money by political posturing.
Really? Does the text or ideology leap out from the tweet's DIV and goes into the products or personel of the company's in nearby ads?
Does Apple also become Republican or Democrat, seen next to a tweet from either supporters too?
By the way, you really just compared being Republican or Democrat to being a Nazi or antisemite?
It's clearly a weak argument, and why are they focusing on X only when they could expand their criticism to the many other social media news feeds. The pants are sagging and the bias is showing.
It’s just a blatantly partisan operation mostly dedicated to criticism of conservative media with close ties to the Democratic Party and the Clintons.
If anything I’m more critical of the SLAPP free speech advocate Elon issued against Media Matters, and Ken Paxton using his power to direct government resources towards a partisan investigation of Media Matters in response to this drama. These BOTH strike me as more corrupt than Media Matters pointing out what posts are appearing by what ads to put pressure on advertisers to cut their ties with Twitter. If anything Musk and Paxton are helping media matters look squeaky clean by contrast.
My hope is that the case establishes on the record all of the skullduggery that MM peddles.
One must support and defend MM's 1A right to be complete pieces work within legal limits.
Reasonable persons should also reject their nonsense.
In fact, let me go subscribe to X right now. This is a move I have resisted, but the cause of fighting the nitwits merits support.
Your 3 comments:
> I'm no adtech expert but <insert something you want to be true to validate your opinion, despite not knowing if it's true>
> Were ads being placed... at the same rate
Again, you have no idea what the answer is here. But you clearly think it supports what you believe.
> Do they not know how humans brain generally work..
A lot of assumptions baked in here that, what do you know, support your own biases. Your a self-admitted non-expert in adtech, but in the course of 3 comments it's suddenly so baffling that people can't see what is so obvious
In other words, HN is full of humans, just like you.
Or is the real complaint that nazi content is being placed next to ads for typically non-nazi twitter users?
We've lived in a time where many media platforms were burning VC money and that brand safety wasn't as important. Now we're seeing everything converge back to middle-of-the-road, inoffensive content due to the reliance on advertising.
It's also useful to understand the origin of Media Matters and know a little about its founder, David Brock. He's a lifetime "dirty tricks" political agent who by his own admission in his 2002 memoir has knowingly and repeatedly put not just misleading statements but outright lies in print before.
Elon Musk also has a record making misleading statements and in some cases outright lies, but what's under discussion is the observable behavior of the platform which leaves behind a wealth of empirical evidence; logs, humans in the loop, third party caching and scraping, etc.
If the outcome of this case becomes available to a prediction market, I would bet 10:1 against Media Matters prevailing absent a full retraction and apology which leads to the suit being dropped.
I think its worth reading, because it claims things are false and then describes how they are literally true, if perhaps incomplete.
If you know even a little of the applicable law, its also worth reading for entertainment value because its shockingly bad even beyond directly undermining its own falsity claims. There's a lot to go into about how bad, but the crowning bit of absolute failure is that it names two defendants—Media Matters and Eric Hanonoki—but then fails to even mention any allegations against Hanonoki in any of its causes of action (he is mentioned only in footnotes past the “Jurisdiction and Venue” section.)
As a layperson I might agree with you, but in these sorts of cases the judges tend to play a pivotal role, as do both the economic power of the plaintiff and the existing reputation of the defendants.
Many any engineer has been run aground by privileging the predictive power of their own literal interpretation over the case law and disposition of the actual judges.