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What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial? If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise. In my opinion, that's the direct
by fooker 8mo ago
What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial?
If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.
In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.
I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
- AmbroseBierce 8mo agoWhat counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
- fooker 8mo agoYou'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally. Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
- phire 8mo agoI think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising. Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content. Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
- fooker 8mo agoGood policy in my opinion.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoYes, a user in GA should be shown an ad for a car dealership in Hawaii…
- HWR_14 8mo agoGeofenced ads are not the same as targeted ads.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoOkay what if I am in Florida and Facebook sees that all of my posts are in Spanish, should it not be allowed to target me with Spanish speaking ads?
- dahart 8mo agoCorrect. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.
- phire 8mo agoSuch a law will probably allow targeting based on the browser's language (browsers already send a "Accept-Language" field, doxing you with every single http request), or whatever language you have configured a website/app interface to be shown in. But not guess a language based on the content of posts.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoBut I don’t speak Spanish and I’m in Florida…
- dahart 8mo agoIsn’t hearing some Spanish from time to time expected in Miami, whether you speak it or not? I expect to hear Spanish and I live nowhere near a coast… And you prefer that advertisers read through your posts/emails/history/everything to make ads targeted at you? If you don’t care about the risks of targeted advertising, and don’t agree with the EU’s decision to ban manipulative behavior, then the proposal we’re discussing maybe isn’t for you. But at least consider that having an ads language setting is not ruled out by this idea, so if you can’t stand Spanish, then you can have your ads in English without the advertisers reading all your posts.
- terminalshort 8mo agoHow will they know where their target audience goes if there is no tracking?
- kaibee 8mo agoUse 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.
- intended 8mo agoGoing too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements / You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads. Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
- NeutralCrane 8mo agoPaying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.
- terminalshort 8mo agoSubscription based services have exactly the same incentive to increase engagement.
- Paradigma11 8mo agoNo, they have diametrically opposite incentives. They want you to pay the subscription without using their resources. Like a fitness studio.
- mqus 8mo agoBut what if I rent a space on your website that I can fill however I want? And then, coincidentally, I praise my products on that rented space. How is that different from... other hosting offers?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- direwolf20 8mo agoJudges and juries are people with common sense, not robots you can easily trick. What did you advertise to clients? It would still be legal to host someone else's content; it would have to be clearly marked as theirs. None of this nonsense where newspapers rent out sections of their website and brand name to advertising companies (IIRC Forbes Business is this — a completely different company renting a sub–URL and sub–brand)