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Instagram ads Facebook won't show you (2021)
- jsnell 4y ago(2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Instagram ads Facebook won't show you - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470 - May 2021 (177 comments)
- anonymouse008 4y agoEven though this is old news, I’m curious to know if any of those “attributes” were embellished. I’ve run FB ads myself and wasn’t ever able to find that granular of targeting without deeper relationships, like admin access, with other pages - looks like groups required that if I’m correct?
- lm28469 4y agoI've worked at a company which ran a looot of ads on fb and it was definitely this granular, it was an eye opener for me
- the_sleaze9 4y agoYikes.
- gedy 4y agoI'm curious if it was effective and worth the trouble? As a consumer, I don't click on ads at all, I don't watch video ads, and basically don't impulse buy anything. And working with companies over the years, our marketing departments didn't really know how or why to do this level of targeting.
- lm28469 4y ago> I'm curious if it was effective I don't think it is, it's mostly bot traffic anyways... > and worth the trouble? ...but companies are paying $$$ for it and it's very easy to setup/run their campaigns and give them the "engagement" reports they ask for. I think everybody with half a brain understands it's a big game of moving money with very little real world/real people engagement
- kennywinker 4y agoThese ads follows along in the proud tradition of banned ads that were designed to be banned from the onset because saying "we got banned" is useful for positioning yourself as dangerous to the establishment.
- worik 4y agoThat is untrue. If Facebook were not shy about their algorithmic approach there would be nothing wrong with these ads. Not so much "...ads that were designed to be banned..." but ads designed to test an hypothesis.
- reb 4y agoMeta: I'm familiar with "an historic", but I've never seen "an hypothesis" before. Is "an before h-" a broader grammatical pattern than I realized?
- lionkor 4y agoMy guess would be people who primarily write, not speak, English. 'h' is a consonant after all, the fact that its like that here may not be apparent to people who write more than they speak English (as a second/third language)
- hammock 4y agoYes >In English, the pronunciation of ⟨h⟩ as /h/ can be analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word ⟨hit⟩, /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt] For words beginning with h and where the first syllable is unstressed (historic, hypothesis, but not hitter, happy) it can be appropriate to use "an" rather than "a" as the associated indefinite article.
- Pfiffer 4y agoAnecdata point of one, but I voice the H on hypothesis. Im a native American English speaker, but from the northwest.
- nixcraft 4y agoContext: from Twitter[0] - "When we made Instagram ads to show you just how you got targeted, we got our ad account disabled. But now Facebook is putting it right out there ~ https://facebook.com/ads/about/ https://facebook.com/ads/about/ " [0] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1600559887742009345 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1600559887742009345
- dymk 4y agoNote that the entity running the ads, in this case Signal, still has no way to identify _who_ was shown the ad. Only Facebook knows that.
- eterm 4y agoAre campaign IDs not a thing for anyone who clicks through? Or simply have a different landing page for each campaign?
- 8ytecoder 4y agoThese ads intentionally identify the parameters but the point they’re making is that you can show these extremely targeted ads and put a lucrative offer that requires entering email/name/phone and voila you’d have unmasked the user.
- dymk 4y agoThis kind of seems like saying 'All a burglar has to do is break into the house and they can set up surveillance in your house'. Yeah sure, that's technically true, but if they're in your house, they can already do far worse. If somebody is willing to go to some scam website and enter arbitrary PII, they've already been compromised, regardless of Facebook's involvement.
- user3939382 4y agoMore like someone can break into the place storing your things that have already been stolen from you. We don’t want advertisers unmasking us but Facebook shouldn’t have this data in the first place.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saaaam 4y agoI did something similar, years ago, for twitter ads, using autogenerated videos. They didn’t block me, although not sure it would work today: https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to-twitter/ https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to-tw...
- johnm212 4y agoIt looks like facebook disputed this story > Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, responded on Twitter on Wednesday saying the screenshots are from early March “when the ad account was briefly disabled for a few days due to an unrelated payments issue.” > Osborne added: “The ads themselves were never rejected as they were never set by Signal to run. The ad account has been available since early March, and the ads that don’t violate our policies could have run since then.” This is from: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-fighting-over-an-ad-campaign.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh... Either way, it's a great publicity stunt by Signal.
- latchkey 4y agoOh right, we should definitely expect to see more ads like this then... uh huh.
- pflenker 4y agoYou can at the same time be against the ads and against misleading publicity stunts.
- latchkey 4y agoIt isn't misleading though. It is exposing what really happens under the covers. They didn't have to run the ads or even be truthful about being blocked. Fact is, they would have been blocked and the ads are indeed targeted. All of the details in those ads, are true. Even if FB doesn't collect the data itself, any time you shop online, you get added to buckets and those buckets get shared when the seller uploads the target data back to FB and then the process starts all over again.
- diogenes-pithos 4y agoWhy are you accepting Facebook's PR narrative as true? From the article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-fighting-over-an-ad-campaign.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh...): > Signal countered on Twitter that it “absolutely did” try to run the ads. “The ads were rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as Facebook should know.” I'm not saying Signal's side is necessarily true, but you're making an affirmative claim that Signal is performing a "misleading publicity stunt", by taking faith on Facebook's narrative as true. *edit: posted the wrong link
- Oras 4y agoI don't know how this is new in any way. This ad [0] was created 6 years ago showing more than the ads in the article. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrjT8m0hcKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrjT8m0hcKU
- guywithahat 4y agoI've always had trouble with this publicity stunt. Like banning people for baseless political or personal reasons is bad, but this is directly insulting Instagram. In effect it's saying "here's the information Instagram has collected on you, now use our platform which doesn't collect this information". Like why would Meta take that reputational hit for a few thousand dollars in the short term. It's a bad deal for them and it makes sense to not do it
- awesomeMilou 4y agoI don't get it, how is revealing the truth about somethning insulting all of a sudden? The displayed ads don't judge, they're shock value is generated solely by what they reveal about instagrams business practices. It's obviously not in Metas best interest to be open about their data collection practices, but that's the entire point of this campaign, that Meta/Facebook/Instagram can only exist with intransparency.
- fumeux_fume 4y agoHow unethical does an action have to be before this rationalization no longer stands?
- guywithahat 4y agoDepends; is someone promoting it to make money? Because signal isn't trying to make facebook better, they're trying to convince people to use signal instead of messenger using some ethically dubious tactics
- twelvedogs 4y agothe fact that anyone who is that terrible would logically not want you to know that they're terrible doesn't really change the terribleness just points out that they're aware of how terrible they are.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 4y agoThe thing is I did see the ads, lots of times ... but it go nothing correct, and really blunted the whole impact.
- hadjian 4y agoI might come off a bit naive, but I didn’t picture the data collection being _this_ precise. Now I’m interested in my own data. Are those companies required to offer a means to download your own data? Did anyone do that and if so, was it readable?
- flappyeagle 4y agoI always feel like I'm the weird one out. The best thing would be no ads. But the second best thing would be hyper-targeted ads because the most annoying thing is ads that are irrelevant to me. When I watch broadcast TV, I hate seeing ads for mattresses, kids toys, menopause medication, home appliances. I want to see ads for camera lenses and cool sneakers.
- INeedMoreRam 4y agoI disagree 100% that hyper-targeted ads are second best to no ads. For me, it's: 1) No ads 2) No ads 3) No ads I accomplish this via a bevy of ad blockers, VPN, and custom DNS settings
- flappyeagle 4y agoso do I. no ads is best. but some ads are native to the medium and unavoidable
- budoso 4y agoI’d tend to agree. Except for the fact that to create good targeted ads it takes tracking my every click and move. And that this can be sold to parties that I’ve never interacted with nor (actively) consented to having my information.
- mustacheemperor 4y agoCurrently facebook has decided I want to see ads for showerheads that cost over $150 and require the use of an app. The first time I saw one I left a very smarmy remark in the comment section about how the last thing I want to buy is a showerhead that pushes content marketing at me through a newsfeed. Facebook has apparently determined I passionately engage with showerhead related ads so that's all I get now.
- gabrielgio 4y agoI don't want to have ads as, and if I have to see I don't want them to be hyper-targeted. I don't remember one time a ad had made me buy something. If I want to buy a new device I look his spec and some review. I understand that unfortunately ads are here to stay, but I'd like to see more context-based ads (like on ddg), they seem to be a good compromise for me: they still serve ads, I can still ignore them and they don't profile me. Also I really dislike the idea that some people are ok or even prefer being tracked across the internet because they want to see ads for some whatever thing they like.That is some dystopian level thinking.
- TACIXAT 4y agoI wrote a generator for these if you want to make your own. https://tacix.at/experiments/signal https://tacix.at/experiments/signal