11 ms·
> "Changes to your behavior and actions..." Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the stateme
by gundmc 6y ago
> "Changes to your behavior and actions..."
Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.
There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.
- dgudkov 6y agoAs my ex-colleague says "Any advertisement is propaganda".
- rexpop 6y agoAnd all propaganda is political.
- cassianoleal 6y agoI believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word. At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".
- rbanffy 6y agoYou can also use "publicidade" in Portuguese, but "propaganda" is not used exclusively for "political propaganda".
- yesenadam 6y agoNot true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio, or sometimes comercial or publicidad. Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used. I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation. Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/propaganda/100407.aspx https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...
- cassianoleal 6y agoI have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?
- hapticmonkey 6y agoI prefer David Foster Wallace's description of advertising: "It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
- lozf 6y agoI always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoWith the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product. So all it really does is sell the promise.
- adamsea 6y agoTrue. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products. They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services. :)
- rexpop 6y agoSo advertisements deplete dignity, with no recompense or amelioration? No wonder our society's replete with indignity.
- ppod 6y agoAlso there is an underlying class thing going on with "you are the product". Choosing to pay for a service is not just an equal alternative to a free service for most people. Most people have to work hard to afford paid services, many of them at low wages. Sneering at people who choose to use a free service rather than sell their time for $15 an hour is not a great look.
- mattgreenrocks 6y agoCan’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.
- dominotw 6y agosocial contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.
- youareignorant 6y agoIf that's true maybe you shouldn't
- hervature 6y agoI'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.
- jim_and_derrick 6y agoMy wife pulled out dusty old binder of my sports cards. Readin thru those things was a trip. On one page with bball cards I had 90s Shaq w/ orlando, very early AI, kukoc, and pippen. Those cards (and sportscenter) were how you got stats and knew shit about sports. Now you have every possible statistic at your fingertips. In my day (90s) us kids had to memorize stats on the back of baseball cards!
- swader999 6y agoThe implications for election advertising are that votes and even revolutions are available to the highest bidder.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoNot just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.
- adamsea 6y agoYou would reduce it all to atoms.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoI’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?
- maigret 6y agoNo it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences: - This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm. - People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment. - The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking. Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoIn a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this. I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.
- dbtc 6y agoThe advertisers are the buyers, the platforms are the sellers whose product is your well-trained eyes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- soneca 6y agoI believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you to stay more time on their site. They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life. The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.
- amurthy1 6y ago> They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because > The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoIn terms of behavior changes: Don't forget alcohol, tasty food, the whole sex industry, fashion, and even many aspects of the shelter industry. There isn't a seller on earth who passes up the opportunity to engender eagerness to buy.
- soneca 6y agoOther platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change. And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger. I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.
- asta_2223 6y agoI am sure there would be regulation and consequences that would apply to Movies, Cable TV, airline flights if misinformation being pushed about Earth being flat to commercially engage them.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoRight, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered. In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web). 1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoActually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".
- joshocar 6y agoWhen we watch ads it's pretty clear that the advertiser is trying to manipulate us. With social media it's different. They are manipulating us to keep us engaged so thay we see more ads. With TV, the network is trying to create a great show that engages people so that they can get more advertising money. I get that, most people get that, it's a win win. We get entertaining shows and they get more eyeballs for afs. With social media, they are doing it in a different way. They use algorithms that create silos of information meant to keep us scrolling. This leads to all kinds of negative effects on society. I would argue that cable news and social media are more alike than different in this respect.
- api 6y agoNone of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel. Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
- adamsea 6y agoFor anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 Unsettling indeed.
- intended 6y agoThis is taking the comment out of its context. Yes its benign taken out of that context. In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.
- bernardlunn 6y agoThere is a world of difference - not just one word - between between contextual & tracking advertising; contextual only knows that somebody reading/watching this content is interested in this subject. Social media tracks everything about YOU. It is totally different
- jdc 6y agoI was with you until the last sentence.
- ldubost 6y ago> > "Changes to your behavior and actions..." > Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior" So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary.. Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV). In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics. Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative. In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary. There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc... It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.
- gfxgirl 6y agoWell, for movies/tv it's well known they were used to get people to buy wedding rings, cigarettes, and many other things. Not the ads, the actual movie/tv show. When you see some character light up a cigarette with a cool pose IIRC that whole idea was started by the tobacco companies to the point now that most people just seem to assume you show someone smoking to make them appear cool. It's portrayed as cool either because of the way the shot is made the person acts, or because knowing their bad for you clearly this person likes take risks, live dangerously, so they're exciting. https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
- nothis 6y agoYea, but it's never spelled out like this.
- sriku 6y agoThe Jaron Lanier quote (with the first part paraphrased but the rest exact) is this - "that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product." Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.