Maybe a month ago, I started getting bombareded with every element of the right wing media ecosphere on Facebook. "Trump for President", Ben Shapiro, JD Vance, and piles of dogwhistle-named Facebook pages who are reaching for every way to feel relevant.
Just recently, all of them, in-concert, started trying to focus on the lady who stole that Baseball at that game. All they are talking about for the last week. Promoted content, sent directly to people's facebook profiles.
Whether or not I feel nationalist terrorists are running the US government, either way I feel the government shouldn't be working this closely with social media. It's extremely dystopian, and it cheapens everything around it.
This makes me wonder why people put up with targeted content whatsoever. I actually have a friend who works in game development, and he has a real chip on his should regarding the current attitude that the discoverable customer base has. For instance, he sees a lot of people who think developers are pushing things down people's throats, are making games bad or annoying on purpose just so that users get frustrated, etc. It's pretty disheartening to him since from his perspective everyone is just doing the best they can, sometimes with quite poor results given the constraints of the market. But ultimately, they really just want to make games that people love and are really try to do so.
My personal theory is that people broadly are becoming very thick skinned with regard to content being pushed on them, but at the same time it has not occurred to people to simply disengage. (ie, they're getting frustrated by the pushers, but aren't leaving forums, social media, youtube, etc. so that no one can push anything on them) I think in some of the darker corners of the web, you currently see this associated with the term "slop." I assume we're all familiar with metaphor. Most of our waking lives (assuming we're on normal platforms) someone is out trying to twist your arm to get your attention, to get you outraged or jealous; anything for attention.
I really think it's breeding an incredible amount of unthinking cynicism, and at least some of the negativity you find online is just related to all the different wars for attention. As noted, it's quite surprising just how many people won't step away from this crazy attention marketplace. It's easy to do in principle: Put down your phone, your computer, and read a book or take a walk. In practice, it's more like overeating; people were never built with impulse control against novelty and social outrage, and lacking the fundamentals most people fail this test.
It's very sad, and very telling that our biggest corporations have become suckups to the reactionary side of the right wing and continue to carry the water for the most degenerate and attention-seeking members of said right wing.
None of these nutcases offer true help to society (note: neither do the extreme leftists, just so we're clear that I'm not team red or team blue), and it does no good that our corporations are actively picking a side.
At this point, whoever opposes big tech regulation is in favor of these kinds of abuses happening. Here in Brazil there is a big discussion around this regulation but for other reasons, like the social media algorithms pushing child abuse content to potential pedophiles.
The criticism against these regulations are all valid and need to be discussed, because we also don't want to create these mechanisms at the government level only so the next authoritarian president can use them for their own personal agenda. But all this discussion should be in the direction of how these companies are going to be regulated, not how they aren't.
Reddit is one of the most potent places where opinion-shaping has been happening. I've been getting ads for Reddit everywhere recently (even thought I've been a reddit user for about 20 years).
r/worldnews is pretty tightly controlled, it's a default subreddit meaning 50+ million people see the posts submitted in this subreddit, and most critically, the ensuing conversation in comments which goes only in one direction. Frankly I'm impressed this all was pulled off so seamlessly.
It is a disservice to yourself and family to not block ads. You shouldn't let these companies have a conduit into your life.
I don't think it's amorale to use the service for which you are blocking the ads for either. If they don't like it, they can try a new business model. They don't protect you, why should you protect them.
The Orbán government here in Hungary is one of the biggest ad spenders in the EU. You literally can't open a YouTube video without seeing propaganda with just plain lies, increasingly with AI-generated video. I find it really hypocritical that these allegedly progressive companies are willing to sell millions of dollars of brainwashing to the most hateful toxic regime in the EU.
> Google did not pro-actively vet the truth of Israeli government claims
It is really scary that people are pushing for Google and Meta to be the arbiter of truth. I don't think people realize what they are asking for. Western civilizations have a tradition of liberal free speech, and allowing the courts to sort out the specifics of what speech causes harm to what parties (libel, etc).
There are already laws on the books for false advertising. In the US, the FTC is one who prosecutes those laws, not Google or Meta!
full disclosure: I work on Ads at Google. You really don't want to privatize the prosecution, judgement, jury, and execution of speech laws to mega corps (and I am usually pro-privatization on most topics).
The thing is that Google already is doing exactly that. Login to adsense and behold the following message: Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.
This has been in place for as long the war has been going on.
That's (initially a small-ish) part of the reason why I've gone from "no ad blockers" to "block absolutely everything". That said, that is only part of the problem. Take tiktok for instance, which is a clean cut, self-installed direct link to the ccp. And not just tiktok: why do you think products such as this [1] exist? And they are dirt cheap too. If you think these aren't selling like mad, boy are you in for a shock. While griefters do exist, the dictators of the world absolutely love these opportunities.
It seems everyone is missing the forest for the trees by focusing on political motives, because the system is working exactly as designed. An ad platform is an auction-based machine for changing human behavior at scale, and a state actor is just the ultimate power user. They have a clear objective, an unlimited budget, and are willing to pay a premium for high-value keywords. To the ad exchange, a bid from the Israeli government to show an anti-UN ad is indistinguishable from a bid from Nike to show a shoe ad; it's just a high CPM impression from a client with a good credit line. The entire infrastructure is optimized to find the highest bidder for a given set of eyeballs, not to make a moral judgment on the message. You don't need to control the newspaper anymore, you just need to outbid everyone else for the ad space next to the article.
Ads are propaganda. Propaganda is Ads. Ads = propaganda.
Propaganda is a tool to persuade people. Are ads an attempt to persuade people?
So is it news that people are using ads/propaganda to persuade people? No.
Will Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple do anything that will harm their revenue as propaganda platform? No.
Do Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple use propaganda? Yes.
This is like reading an article about how weapons from weapon companies are being weaponized.
UNRWA is compromised as hell, ofc it must go, so it's a pretty good use case for ethical ads usage. Definitely not a reason to enforce an additional censorship.
Ads have long been weapons. It's time the west woke up to the threat of propaganda. And no, addressing this is not incompatible with "free speech." Propaganda is not free speech. The person paying for the propaganda has a voice they can use, that is their free speech.
Whenever did it become somehow a "right" to be able to pay for large scale propaganda? Oddly enough this right is not afforded to those without the funds to pay for it.
Don't forget about the entirety of regular social media -- Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, etc, etc, etc. Planting follow bait and switching to propaganda memes is a pervasive tactic. At this point propaganda mongers only need processing investment not direct ad investment.
This article brings up important questions about digital influence in wartime, but it's hard to ignore how one-sided the framing is when it comes to Israel.
There's barely a mention of the October 7 massacre, where over 1,200 Israelis were murdered and hundreds taken hostage some of them are children. That’s the context behind Israel’s messaging. Leaving that out gives a very distorted picture of why these campaigns exist in the first place.
The article criticizes Israel for running ads that target UNRWA, but completely skips the fact that more than a dozen UNRWA staff were accused of actively participating in the massacre and holding hostages, That allegation was serious enough for countries like the US, Germany, the UK, and Australia to suspend their funding. That’s not “disinformation,” that’s a real international response.
There’s also zero mention of Hamas’s own propaganda operations. No discussion of how they use Telegram, TikTok, or social platforms to push graphic and often fake content to manipulate global opinion. If we're talking about the weaponization of information, how is that not relevant?
Instead, the article spends thousands of words dissecting Israel’s side while ignoring everything else. It presents only one narrative and wraps it in a moral argument that conveniently excludes key facts and context.
A fair critique would examine how all sides are using digital tools in modern conflicts, not just the one the author disagrees with politically. Otherwise, it’s not an analysis. It’s just a well-written piece of propaganda in itself.
23 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadJust recently, all of them, in-concert, started trying to focus on the lady who stole that Baseball at that game. All they are talking about for the last week. Promoted content, sent directly to people's facebook profiles.
Whether or not I feel nationalist terrorists are running the US government, either way I feel the government shouldn't be working this closely with social media. It's extremely dystopian, and it cheapens everything around it.
My personal theory is that people broadly are becoming very thick skinned with regard to content being pushed on them, but at the same time it has not occurred to people to simply disengage. (ie, they're getting frustrated by the pushers, but aren't leaving forums, social media, youtube, etc. so that no one can push anything on them) I think in some of the darker corners of the web, you currently see this associated with the term "slop." I assume we're all familiar with metaphor. Most of our waking lives (assuming we're on normal platforms) someone is out trying to twist your arm to get your attention, to get you outraged or jealous; anything for attention.
I really think it's breeding an incredible amount of unthinking cynicism, and at least some of the negativity you find online is just related to all the different wars for attention. As noted, it's quite surprising just how many people won't step away from this crazy attention marketplace. It's easy to do in principle: Put down your phone, your computer, and read a book or take a walk. In practice, it's more like overeating; people were never built with impulse control against novelty and social outrage, and lacking the fundamentals most people fail this test.
None of these nutcases offer true help to society (note: neither do the extreme leftists, just so we're clear that I'm not team red or team blue), and it does no good that our corporations are actively picking a side.
The criticism against these regulations are all valid and need to be discussed, because we also don't want to create these mechanisms at the government level only so the next authoritarian president can use them for their own personal agenda. But all this discussion should be in the direction of how these companies are going to be regulated, not how they aren't.
r/worldnews is pretty tightly controlled, it's a default subreddit meaning 50+ million people see the posts submitted in this subreddit, and most critically, the ensuing conversation in comments which goes only in one direction. Frankly I'm impressed this all was pulled off so seamlessly.
I don't think it's amorale to use the service for which you are blocking the ads for either. If they don't like it, they can try a new business model. They don't protect you, why should you protect them.
It is really scary that people are pushing for Google and Meta to be the arbiter of truth. I don't think people realize what they are asking for. Western civilizations have a tradition of liberal free speech, and allowing the courts to sort out the specifics of what speech causes harm to what parties (libel, etc).
There are already laws on the books for false advertising. In the US, the FTC is one who prosecutes those laws, not Google or Meta!
full disclosure: I work on Ads at Google. You really don't want to privatize the prosecution, judgement, jury, and execution of speech laws to mega corps (and I am usually pro-privatization on most topics).
This has been in place for as long the war has been going on.
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Android-Phone-Farm-Se...
It’s propaganda-as-a-service.
Regulating the corporations or their shadow, the government is both fine I guess and with that out of the way: lets discuss this!
So is it news that people are using ads/propaganda to persuade people? No. Will Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple do anything that will harm their revenue as propaganda platform? No.
Do Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple use propaganda? Yes.
This is like reading an article about how weapons from weapon companies are being weaponized.
Whenever did it become somehow a "right" to be able to pay for large scale propaganda? Oddly enough this right is not afforded to those without the funds to pay for it.
After the pressure from the outcome of election influencing, there seemed to be new rules come in place.
For other topics? Not so sure. Maybe it's something to look at before it has an election type response.
There's parallels to this I suspect in other industries affecting the world.
There's barely a mention of the October 7 massacre, where over 1,200 Israelis were murdered and hundreds taken hostage some of them are children. That’s the context behind Israel’s messaging. Leaving that out gives a very distorted picture of why these campaigns exist in the first place.
The article criticizes Israel for running ads that target UNRWA, but completely skips the fact that more than a dozen UNRWA staff were accused of actively participating in the massacre and holding hostages, That allegation was serious enough for countries like the US, Germany, the UK, and Australia to suspend their funding. That’s not “disinformation,” that’s a real international response.
There’s also zero mention of Hamas’s own propaganda operations. No discussion of how they use Telegram, TikTok, or social platforms to push graphic and often fake content to manipulate global opinion. If we're talking about the weaponization of information, how is that not relevant?
Instead, the article spends thousands of words dissecting Israel’s side while ignoring everything else. It presents only one narrative and wraps it in a moral argument that conveniently excludes key facts and context.
A fair critique would examine how all sides are using digital tools in modern conflicts, not just the one the author disagrees with politically. Otherwise, it’s not an analysis. It’s just a well-written piece of propaganda in itself.