How this somehow translated, in the era of online youtube videos, to the exact opposite is still a mystery to me. So what if your ad appeared next to something radical on youtube? So what if your ads appeared next to some weird sex segment of youtube? People who see it aren't going to confuse the ads with the video, just the same as people watching television isn't confusing the ads with the programme.
This is simply not true. If you go back long enough shows were often sponsored by specific advertisers making the link even stronger than traditional preroll YouTube ads (this practice goes back to radio, so it is even older than TV). It also ended up with bizarre pairings like "'The Flinstones' brought to you by Winston Cigarettes."[1]
Eventually cable TV came along and it didn't have the type of FCC oversight that broadcast TV does. However you generally only see swearing and nudity on premium cable and not basic cable despite no official rules preventing it. The primary reason for this is that basic cable still relies and advertisers while premium cable does not. Basic cable channels still fear advertisers dropping out if their ads are paired with objectionable content. And that is really all that is happening on YouTube. GM doesn't doesn't want their latest car ad to appear in front of a racist manifesto. I don't think that is a particularly unreasonable desire for an advertiser.
Transformers was only advertising for Hasbro. They licensed the toys then made a show around them to sell them.
And as a big Transformers fan as a kid I along with many others fell right for it!
Look at it like this:
Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.
I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.
This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.
This isn't true. In the past, some viewers have always followed the money trail of a tv show which inevitably leads to the sponsors/advertisers that help fund it. Example of tv advertisers pulling out of controversial topics:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/30/business/main-character-e...
As I've mentioned many times before, there is no media institution on the planet (whether private corporate or public government funded) -- that is immune from censorship because every piece of the chain (creation, distribution, broadcasting, advertising, etc) all require money and money is the ultimate lever to apply pressure via government decrees, consumer boycotts, advertiser boycotts, employee revolts, journalists shaming, etc.
Nobody has invented an implementation that can withstand any pressure to filter content but also be available to the mainstream masses. Google even with its billions has to tame Youtube to placate advertisers. Apple, even with its billions has to placate China. Niche/obscure "censorship-proof" tech like Freenet/IPFS is not for the masses and the desirable content creators can't monetize their effort there.
> For the second time within a year, the Coalition for Better Television is threatening a boycott of one or more companies that advertise on prime-time television, but this time without the support of its most prominent member, the Moral Majority.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...
When theories about child-eating democrats are freely stated as facts and picked up ans spun further in the recommendations so that a conspiracy theorist ends up in Congress (and a significant minority of the population is fine with that), then yes, I as a consumer want to execute on my free speech to hold advertisers responsible for sponsoring that.
I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.
At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.
Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.
Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.
In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.
The ad breaks came later as TV realized that the ad was forever part of the show and so they didn't get more money when the did a rerun.
I am sure that you believe it's true, but advertisers have been used to being able to control what content they were put next to for a long time. I don't know whether it matters, or is valuable, but I do know that they have cared for long enough that it has been one of the largest influences on literally what television programs got made (even if this influence appears oblique, it has been one of the primary motivations of the folks making these decisions).
You can make an argument that the Internet allows things to work differently, but I think it was simply a matter of what was practical - once it became ~ practical to start exercising some control over what you're associating your brand with, of course folks would jump to pull that lever.
Things did actually work differently. YouTube doesn't pay for content before it airs, and large amounts of the income for a show happen as it's left up. When YouTube demonitizes - and it can do this for an entire channel - it's not just a single episode either. Nor can the content be shopped around to other platforms as easily.
Even if the station wanted to take down your content, you at least got a station manager calling your production staff and not just a "We're sorry, but you violated our vague ToS." message with no response mechanism in it. It had some element of human review and wasn't susceptible to brigading.
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.
But what we did see happens is that shows which were likely to provoke a negative response from audiences or advertisers were never produced, in large part for the exact same reasons.
The specific shape of events may look different, but that's the result of democratization, allowing more people to be part of the game where they spend money, make stuff, and get ads run against it.
In the cases where YouTube does pay for stuff before it airs or offers a guarantee on future ads, I am fairly confident the old TV dynamics are at play - they will ensure that the content they are funding will garner viewers and not offend advertisers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Big_Brother_(British...
News papers have long had a policy that the advertising department wasn't in control of what the news said. The advertisers didn't like it, but they went with it because they knew that it is what the eyeballs wanted.
There is a fine line though - some companies didn't advertise in particular outlets (playboy is an obvious example), which might or might not work out for them.
The question is where is the power. YouTube is acting like they don't have power here, but in fact they do: a large portion of video is on YouTube, and so if YouTube says "too bad, either give us your money or not", the advertisers will need to pay up. Of course there is a cost to youtube in doing that which they might not be willing to pay: some advertisers will say no. Others will tell youtube fine, but we are not willing to pay as much as you could get if we got more control who sees us.
The question isn't where the power is, the question is how much money does YouTube need/want?
https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/23/verizon-and-att-latest-to...
As any student of history knows, this is hardly a new phenomenon, but it was never before so globally industrialised or automated.
> everyone was happy
"Everyone" ... except for all the people whose lives are made materially worse by the subsequent ease of disseminating hate material & misinformation. Also unhappy: anyone possessing the humanity to feel for others in distress.
> cowed or [...] ideologically sympathetic
Intentional or not, this came across dripping with derision, but it falls flat: the only "ideological sympathy" here is that of being a decent human being.
> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
>This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
Wonderful. And the "asshole" designation that these Elect ("extremely small set of ..." as was put above) - how do they get to decide who's an asshole and gets shown the door, what are their criteria and what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal or ratify their decision-making?
Can we at least agree that censors can make mistakes, or have their own biases? And shouldn't censors be policed as well, so they are accountable to the public?
Again, a statement dripping with derision, that is actually just sticking up for the rights of assholes.
> how do they get to decide who's an asshole
Peddling a message harmful to others.
> what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal
"appeal" is for crooks, not wankers being thrown out of the pub
Your name-calling should be enough for people to raise their eyebrows at the question: who decides what gets censored.
Tip for idiots thrown out of pubs: yelling at the bouncers isn't going to get your name off the landlord's shit-list, and you don't have a right to make everyone listen to your drivel.
Wrong. There are multiple points that come in play here, none of which are as simple as "the activists are protesting against Nazi and conspiracy crap":
First of all, linear TV, radio and newspapers had human reviews in the loop at every stage: client, producer, ad broker, station/paper. That meant that the chance of valuable ads appearing next to bullshit was somewhat next to zero - and also, that "fringe content" was restricted to unscrupulous (or from the same niche) advertisers. Essentially, there was a feedback loop: content that was not mainstream-worthy had no chance of being financed.
Internet advertising and especially social networks with monetization and targeted advertising however, turned up all of that. Suddenly, a Nestle ad could run as a front-roll of Alex Jones lunacy. The result was that an awful lot of really awful content creators had both the technical capability to reach out to millions of people (thanks to the Internet, which eliminated the traditional gatekeepers) and the advertising income that was previously reserved to mainstream-able content.
The result of that, in turn, was an explosion in numbers of these "content creators" and their content (simply because many of them could now actually afford to quit regular jobs)... and thus, combined with the explosion of followers of such content, meant minorities had to suffer from a constant barrage of both online hate speech and real world violence - including many acts of terrorism that claimed human lives, and culminating in the events of January 6th 2021.
What the "extremely small set of activists and journalists" is doing is attempting to rein in the hate and the violence that results of it. And yes, making brands and their advertising agencies aware of what is going on and where their money ends up is a good thing.
There's probably room in the middle somewhere.
Because these extremely small set of activists include the UK’s government and the newspaper The Guardian who pulled their ads due to YouTube placing them next to “extremist content”. Not to mention the numerous US government watchdogs who have been sniffing out a way to thwart google and Facebook for years now.
As far as actual extreme reactionary content.. I don't know what the solution is. I'd put "the middle" as stop promoting them because they hit your engagement metrics, but be much more cautious about banning them, giving them martyrdom points and an incentive to organize better.
Ultimately the villain here is engagement-optimizing recommendation algos. The current situation is a small reactionary channel will be promoted for engagement, until it's big and people notice, and THEN it's banned, with a maximum of negative impact. Worst of all worlds.
With every such news article, YouTube stepped up its game. It culminated with PewdiePie making an "anti-semetic" joke, and this resulted in the Adpocalypse.
So I'd say it was more commercial interests than activism interests, but at times these align.
I think the only thing I've seen universally agreed upon to be bad is child pornography.
Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.
For example, I'm told the character creator in 'Cyberpunk 2077' offers adjustable penis size - but many streamers and reviewers won't risk showing it. Even comedy channels that love creating zany characters.
After all, would you trust Youtube to detect whether nudity is pornographic context, when they can't even tell if 'white threatens black' is in a chess context?
There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on it.
The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream. Other ideas, such as Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction I believe.
The other trouble is that one side is actively opposed to a "well informed populace" and unironically calls secondary education "liberal brainwashing camps".
If you want a well informed populace, you have to privilege the side attempting to get there.
Attemps to ban things that are false runs into the difficulty that you need to first determine what is false, which is hard to do if one of the answers might contradict an important value.
I should stop replying to political posts with more politics. :/
What do you mean by the equality dogma?
What would be the difference in public policy anyways if after-the-fact results differ?
Another might be seeing the lack of women plumbers (or whatever) and deciding that this is both bad and fixable and investing a bunch of money into advertising how awesome plumbing is to girls in school.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that we, as a society, should not invest in worst performers? How would we even know beforehand? And how would withdrawing such funding from "bad" schools not affect the opportunity of all of the children of that school?
What's your point about the gender ratios of certain occupations? That it's a waste of money to try to alter?
I don't have the time to give an in depth discussion on education etc the attention it would need.
Though to elaborate on the education policy difference, you can invest variable amounts into the bottom performers, even eventually giving up on them. As I understand it, schools currently have various legal obligations towards students that lead to them spending disproportionate resources on the least performant.
This is the difference between "we are banning substance X because we did a controlled experiment and found it to be carcinogenic", and "we are banning X because we are afraid of ghosts".
This is the gist of it and is really hard to tell, even though some people claim it’s easy.
I would measure what side makes sense based on their recommended interventions. For example, if one side is so certain they want to ban speech that contradicts them then they are probably wrong.
It takes pretty clear evidence for what is right and wrong and lots of effort to determine. So it’s usually hard to dedicate those resources to topics.
Of course there are lots of sides and not just two so it becomes harder and harder.
It seems to me that people are nearly universally assuming that this is easy, and that obviously their side is always absolutely correct, and questioning that is basically heretic. This is how we end up always blaming the evil other side, and with "you're either with us or against us".
That and as much as people complain, there’s a magical thinking that technology can do anything they see in sci-fi or an AI consultant has told them is possible.
So I would like to hear back from people after they’ve tried for a while.
The other guy is also claiming that Trump won the election, global heating is a hoax, COVID-19 is a hoax, Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, and his wife Michelle is a man.
> And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing.
Sorry, this just isn't so.
Your answer boils down to this: "There is no truth. If one person says Michelle Obama is a transsexual man, and the other says she isn't, then both truths are equally good."
Every since the ban on free speech, I really haven't followed what the conspiracies are. What I do hear is 3rd party reports on what those conspiracies are and what 'they believe'.
You listed off a bunch of nonsense - do you really think people actually believe that crap or are you the one fooled into thinking someone actually believes that? The more outlandish they sound, the better case for censoring, right? These cases just sound like a reporter went on 4chan, decided they dont like this so they must be the 'other side'. And it was enough to convince the majority that censorship is the way.
Better phrased, let's stop giving attention to a desperate media who's only function in this past decade is cancelling culture they don't approve. (culture censorship)
Both sides are extremely polarized, only one side seems to be able to share their opinion online. One side believes this is proper because they answer to the 'science'. What does the science say about censorship? We've seen it before.
I personally know someone who believes about half of that. It sure doesn't feel unusual.
Many of those things have pretty neat analogues in the extreme left - the extremists didn't accept that 2016 was legitimate, they've been fighting the science on nuclear power for 50 years and they wasted a lot of everyone's time trying to argue that Trump was a Russian asset.
Neither wing of politics is a shining example of sane ideas.
The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.
Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways.
But one side, the Republican side, is batshitinsane and believes things that are provably untrue - Obama is a Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID-19 is the flu, that sort of thing.
The Democrats are just run-of-the-mill, low-energy centrist politicians.
The media did one hell of a job this past election cycle, I wonder what batshitinsane things we will be allowed to talk about on the next one. I doubt much.
Now that we haved moved censorship officially online as well, I can only hope some wonderful people are busy building the next workaround medium.
Generalizations are useful until they aren't! Let's put our thinking hats for a sec don't you think?
What you are arguing for is not democracy but "safetyism". You seek a shortcut whereby you can persuade a powerful gatekeeper to silence your oppositon and make you feel better.
If a desire for free speech, to pick a contemporary example, leads to defending the 'right' of the Myanmar military to use Facebook for their coup to oppress the Burmese, pragmatism is probably better.
Consider Qanon people, or NeoNazis, or Boogaloo Boys, etc. It is impossible to prove beyond any doubt that are more dangerous or more wrong than 'normal' people. But if we're being pragmatic, there isn't a reasonable doubt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
Soviets did not give airtime to pro-party ideologues to validate their position. There was no competition between ideologues to get more airtime. The program was _dictated_ by the powers that be.
How is that accurate?
Which is indeed your prerogative until you mess with the laws of physics and start believing that because you move your arms very quickly you can fly, and that will stop you from falling off of a cliff.
There is a five-whys strategy to go to some bottom of an issue but even this strategy will fail you when you cherry-pick the answers to your convenience.
I think I replied to assimilation of the idea of totalitarian regime institutionalizing otherwise mentally healthy people for dissidence to merely not letting them vent on radio.
Indirect lines explaining seemingly unrelated concepts are everywhere. They even made some shows about that. However, linking these two particular concepts together is strange.