Three reasons:
1. In most responsible news organizations, there is a significant firewall between advertising and news. In two places I worked, the sales people weren't even allowed to go into the newsroom.
2. News organizations are not IT departments. A reporter is not involved in how a web site is built, or what goes on behind the scenes. There are different people in different departments for that.
3. Just because a newspaper does something bad with its web site does not make what happens at Facebook/Google/etc... any less bad. SV needs to get over the whole "But Bobby jumped off the bridge, too!" mentality.
2. They're reporters... if they don't know what's going on in their own backyard, there's a serious issue.
3. Maybe, but there's something ironic about the fact that this very reporting only exists because of these ad practices. This person most likely wouldn't have a job if the very practice they are reporting on didn't exist.
It is an interesting line of thought to consider these compromises and when they may cross the line. Which means are justified by the ends? Which means are not?
The point is that it's not really their back yard. It's a different office on a different floor, possibly even a different subcontracted company than where the journalists are working. They don't have any more scope to be aware of the ad tech than they do understanding how a CDN works.
By analogy, this is kind of like expecting a journalists in the old days to be especially aware of conditions in paper mills because their papers are printed on paper.
How can you talk extensively about the way Facebook does advertising without knowing how its done everywhere else? Doesn't that make you a bad journalist?
By analogy, it'd be like if someone was reporting on how a burger at McDonalds tastes, without having eaten a burger anywhere else.
If you're going to research a topic and some of that research turns up as "Lots of websites run these ad networks" it is a necessary step to ask "do we do that too?".
So there's two options here:
1) The reporter knew the parent company does this.
2) The reporter doesn't know.
In case 1, they either don't talk about it because they are blocked or they don't think it is necessary (which I'd argue is at best misleading and at worst malicious). For case 2, well that just doesn't seem like good reporting.
So I think your analogy doesn't work. It isn't because "people don't know tech" but rather "are journalists asking the right questions and doing good research." If the latter is poor because "they don't know tech" then we have a major problem and as the tech class we need to call them out on it (create a feedback loop to solve the problem).
Buzzfeed has picked up $496 million in VC funding [1] since its inception. It's a catch-22 where they could absolutely have done this reporting without ad-based monetization, but the potential for- ad-based monetization is why the VCs parted with money in the first place.
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/buzzfeed#section-fun...
Absolutely it does. The prevailing narrative is that SV tech companies are innovators in this space, invading your privacy in ways that normal companies would never dream of. "Facebook engages in industry standard data collection" is a very different story, even if the industry standard is still bad.
However the parent's claim is subtly different: it states that the industry practice of data collection is not unusual, not that it's not wrong.
How do you figure? It seems to me that even if the news organization does everything Facebook/Google/etc. does, that doesn't make Facebook/Google/etc. less bad. It only makes the news organization equally bad.
If everyone else also violates privacy in the same ways, this aspect of the narrative isn't true.
Reality is, that both Google and Facebook have cleaned up the AD industry ( but not enough, of course ).
Data brokers continue to be the worst actors in the Ad industry.
Publishing articles with the same poison still raises awareness of the issue, though it would be best for them to disable ads on these articles, or to at least be upfront.
Call the news orgs out for doing the same reprehensible activity, yes. But let's judge the arguments about which activities are reprehensible on their own merits.
In this situation Buzzfeed is pretending that this tracking is bad to generate more clicks so that their ads can invade more privacy to generate more income, exactly like Facebook. If they actually thought it was bad, their business model wouldn't rely upon it.
Only suckers believe Buzzfeed actually thinks this is bad.
(1) Having good arguments out in the world is a good thing.
(2) Positive feedback tends to reinforce behavior - and we want to reinforce news orgs making good arguments against bad behavior.
(3) After you have acclaimed their argument, it's much more effective when you use it against them.
If you just constantly snipe at people and organizations, I think it becomes much harder to effect change.
In "Phaedo," Plato has Socrates give a lesson about misology - that is, hating all reasoning and arguments, and assuming they are bad because you can always find flaws and it's so difficult to reach certainty. It's the intellectual version of misanthropy. Socrates cautions strongly against misology. Just because there are problems with an argument, doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to try to improve and take the good parts from every argument we can find, no matter how flawed the other parts (or the speaker) are. I think this is an important lesson in these times. I think we should stop fighting over whether a person or organization is allowed to say certain things, and concentrate on what parts of what they say should change our behavior.
That's ridiculous. If Hitler once made a good argument about something, that doesn't invalidate usage of that same argument by other people.
I mean really. I can't even think of a hypothetical example where that would make sense.
And Hitler fucking sucked, fuck that guy.
Actually, no. The world is full of people who do bad things while believing they are bad.
For example, I engage in a lot of practices that I think are harmful for the environment. I buy food that I suspect/believe is causing the environment harm. I buy products made with packaging that I believe causes harm. But I'm still openly against those practices. And if a ballot measure comes up to ban products involving those practices in my city/state/country, I'll vote for it.
There's no inconsistency here. The notion that one is required to practice what they preach is a flawed one. Knowledge and practice are orthogonal. People do bad things because they get value out of them. Knowing it is wrong doesn't suddenly reduce the value one gets from them. My food tastes the same regardless of my knowledge on the harm it does to the environment.
Only if we already know they've murdered someone before they advocate against murder. Until we do find out, the murderer appears the same as anybody else, despite being a hypocrite.
A smoker who writes a column that smoking is bad is still doing good writing.
A charge of hypocrisy is a straight-up ad hominem. It might make you mistrust the person making the argument, but it doesn't say anything about the facts.
But: so what?
When I read the news, the last thing I care about is the mores of the news organisation. Reporting on a politician pilfering taxes? Couldn't care less if the reporter panama papered his way through life. Writing about a politician illegally snooping on citizens? Don't give a damn if you got that info by illegally snooping on the politician. Is the news true? That's all I want to know.
I read the news for the news. Are the facts solid? Good. Are you crooked? Don't care.
The comment I was replying to seemed to indicate that the Buzzfeed author's stance was incorrect. This is a fine point, but really important, and I think it gets lost in public discourse a lot these days: hypocricy does not invalidate an argument.
It doesn't make what they're saying automatically invalid, but knowledge that the person saying something is obviously a hypocrite is a form of evidence about how likely what they're saying is true.
I'm putting the quotes there because Buzzfeed is not a singular entity with a set of beliefs it identifies with. It's also not like a cult where everyone has to believe the same ideas. Which is why it is nonsensical to ascribe hypocrisy to a non-person entity ...
And that is exactly how you can get an article against adtech written for and published on a platform that is using said adtech similar to what the article speaks out against.
The worst part of it all is IMHO that the entire top of this discussion is dominated by arguing about whether Buzzfeed is hypocritical or not, instead of discussing the actual topic at hand.
No, but they might say: "Why should we listen to you!? MURDERER!" Then proceed to stone you to death, and see who dares get up on the podium to make an announcement about stoning.
There are different constructs.
Do reporters not get any access to their analytics?
Either A) They know what their own website is doing and think it's OK, in which case there may be a conflict of interest. If that's the case, we should take any suggestions they have about how to resolve the problem with a gain of salt.
or B) They don't know what their own website is doing, in which case they've done a pretty poor job researching their own article. I don't expect a reporter to be a tech expert, but I do expect them to be inquisitive enough to think, "when people say that advertising pays for reporting, might they conceivably mean the same thing as when they say that advertising pays for Facebook?"
Facebook's privacy violations are bad. The hypocrisy of journalists calling them out doesn't change that. But in the privacy community, it should make us suspicious of their articles for the same reason we should be suspicious of a scientific study of sugar paid for by the meat industry. It should push us to double check their claims and question what their motivations are.
These are people who's interests either happen to align with ours temporarily and that might change in the future, or they're allies who haven't done enough research to be able to make strong claims about what our responses and policy changes should be.
It's not that Buzzfeed is wrong about Facebook. It's that they're not currently in a responsible or knowledgeable enough position to lead the conversation about Facebook.
On the other hand, if adtech practices are bad (and they are), then it is not only Facebook that needs to change.
And the journalists in turn aren't allowed to look at their own websites when researching a story?
> A reporter is not involved in how a web site is built, or what goes on behind the scenes.
But they do talk to IT people when they write stories about IT things, don't they?
I'm all with you that it doesn't change the story's correctness one bit, but it does question the self-awareness of journalists as part of companies. Unless it's a secret move to get people to focus on the stuff their organisation does which they can't publicly comment on for fear of being sacked (by the ads people, presumably), that would be quite different.
edit: I'd love to reply, but somebody in their limitless wisdom has decided to time me out for whatever reason.
Generally, no. They talk to people on the outside.
Unless it's a secret move
It's always amusing to me the conspiracy theories people have about journalism. These are people who boost their egos, their living, their careers by telling people things. The changes of hundreds of thousands of journalists keeping a secret about anything are pretty close to zero.
fear of being sacked (by the ads people, presumably)
This only very rarely happens (It happened to me once, and then the company contested by unemployment claim!), but only at very small organizations. Like where the entire newsroom is fewer than ten people.
Editor: "So your last screed about Facebook got a ton of clicks and shares, can you do another?"
Tell me more about that firewall. In modern news orgs, you're selling the words next to the content, not the readership.
> 2. News organizations are not IT departments. A reporter is not involved in how a web site is built, or what goes on behind the scenes. There are different people in different departments for that.
Journalists are inquisitive, intellectually curious types. You have to call into question the ethics of someone prepared to write about something they have a good idea that their own company engages in.
> 3. Just because a newspaper does something bad with its web site does not make what happens at Facebook/Google/etc... any less bad. SV needs to get over the whole "But Bobby jumped off the bridge, too!" mentality.
This is just tu quoque. It's not exonerating Facebook at all (though Facebook typically have a deterministic data set to work with, which reduces the kind of shady practices they need to engage in with third party data sets), it's merely saying that you don't get a free pass on calling this kind of stuff out if you're engaging in the same kind of data gathering yourself.
So what is the ethical thing to do? Quit your job? Choose not to report on the unethical behavior? Escalate internally instead of externally? Write the story about the company you work for, knowing full well that you won't ever be published and it will end up being pointless?
I don't think anybody wants to give buzzfeed a free pass, but I just don't see how buzzfeed's data practices reflect on the ethics of their individual journalists.
The same people that ordered him to write this article have also ordered other people to do unethical things. But that's a different scenario than you just mentioned. So if you think this is immoral, than I imagine that your actual argument is more of a guilt by association thing.
> Newsflash, BuzzFeed's ad networks onboard and sync information about their readers in exactly the same way. Do people think that BF loads Quantcast, Scorecard Research etc onto their site for the good of their health? ...
> I have no idea why people don't call BS on news orgs that run 'exposes' on Facebook's ad targeting, when they target, track and follow their readers in exactly the same way.
What you're advocating is basically a circular firing squad.
If you have to be impeccably pure to call out a wrong (and furthermore, only associate with impeccably pure people and organizations), then no one will ever call out any wrongs and they'll fester and grow.
The level of understanding that most people have about online tracking is just really, really low, and this author probably wouldn't know about any of this if Facebook didn't have that particular page.
Edit: yes most likely the author is someone that may be seldonmly writing for the site, or just sells his texts and doesn't really pay attention/care where this is posted.
So with regards to BuzzFeed I'm very aware of what garbage their site is. Right now on BuzzFeedNews I see 9 third party domains running ads or tracking pixels via JavaScript.
Ironically, one of those 9 is Facebook. So Facebook is tracking the people reading this article about how Facebook is tracking them.
But most people aren't technologically savvy enough or can't be bothered to run tools like these, and just browse the internet with basically no understanding of what is happening as they do.
I find it hard to believe they looked into the subject and didn't run across these. But I suppose it's possible.
Not only is the media guilty of many of the popular tech company sins, but they originated them.
* Putting us all into filter bubbles where a few big players control and curate the information seen by the masses? The media did it first.
* Using the aforementioned powers to affect elections and democracy, sometimes adversely? The media did it first.
* Advertiser-supported business models? The media did it first.
* Obsessively optimizing the product for reads/clicks, thus leading to sensationalist clickbait headlines, an overabundance of negativity, and an extreme focus on novelty above all else? The media did it first.
The media doesn't like tech for the same reason you almost always see when any two industries feud with each other: because they're competitors and one feels threatened by other.
And if BuzzFeed has no such disclosure page, you'd expect the reporter to mention that, and credit Facebook more strongly for having one.
Nice passive voice. A writer good enough to write for the New York Times only writes a sentence that passive and convoluted for a very good reason.
"We track, use and share the data of you, the reader, and sell this to advertisers."
Though even if they weren't that wouldn't really invalidate the points made in the article.
https://www.crowdtangle.com/privacy
The company's clients include many news publications like Buzzfeed. This company is part of Facebook.
> In 1667, the English gardener, William Lucas, published a seed catalogue, which he mailed to his customers to inform them of his prices.
I just have trouble seeing how adding computers to this practice is the line that is too far for people.
Just because I happen windowshop some store doesn't mean I gave them permission to ask for my info around. They're free to ask me. But that's just me.
Newsflash, BuzzFeed's ad networks onboard and sync information about their readers in exactly the same way. Do people think that BF loads Quantcast, Scorecard Research etc onto their site for the good of their health?
That's not to mention the viral quizzes and other data gathering exercises that BuzzFeed invented and sold as a product.
I have no idea why people don't call BS on news orgs that run 'exposes' on Facebook's ad targeting, when they target, track and follow their readers in exactly the same way.