What do they mean by targeted? Like targeted how and with what if they're talking about using the already targeted advertising data that shows a teen is receiving ads for emotional stuff?
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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To the business world humans are ultimately just conduits to money. But somehow people think privatizing everything is the best way government can serve the public.
I pirated her book (because fuck her, she was a Facebook exec) and learned that she had a gnarly near-death experience as a child when she got attacked by a shark at the beach.
I didn't finish the book due to a combination of laziness and my general revulsion at anything Zuck adjacent, but if you have the stomach for it there's a cool shark attack story in it for you at least.
Were you rooting for the shark?
/s Meanwhile, in some Signal group: “Should we suicide her or do you guys figure she might have some ICE-worthy tattoos?”
:punch: :americanflag: :fire:
Ban optimisation without popular consent!
Sorry, I'm a bit dense. What do you mean?
Organisations aren't entitled to use automated systems to alter people's behaviour (i.e. here they're using an algorithm to maximise the number of ad clicks). It should only be allowed if it's in the interests of the people affected, and with their (informed) agreement
I am betting it was already in that 40 page agreement you clicked when you singed up 😞
where would the line between manipulation and traditional advertisement be? theaters frequently exhaust the buttery scent in areas where theatergoers will be to intice them, casinos avoid 90° angels and clocks to disorientate customers and promote time blindness.
I'm not a native speaker and I legit googled "what are casino 90° angels", then I realized it was supposed to be "angles" and now I feel dumb lol
On a 777 the angels blind you with divine light so you can't find your way out of the slot machines.
It's a common mistake for even native speakers. Dessert 🎂 vs desert 🏜️ is another common one
Yes these are also bad.
He'll yeah dude! This should be the global law
Good thing InstaFlow exists
Don’t all social media and internet companies do that? It’s all a case of machine learning. I can’t open Insta these days without being blasted with reels of boobs, cleavage etc. My wife gets reels of cooking, dancing etc. It doesn’t have to do anything with our searches or viewing. They’re using our personal information to create a model and shoving targeted content based on that down our throats. This has the highest probability of increasing engagement on their platform.
I'm convinced insta knows your a guy and will blast you with reels full of chicks no matter what you do.
Yeah, it’s impossible to escape the thottening. Same with snap
But emotional state?
I can't speak to "emotional state", but the thottening is a real thing (I've spent weeks trying to stop having all these ass models from cluttering up my feed, it's impossible)
Well sure, but it is more than that. Advertising ,broadly, is literally there expressly to manipulate your emotional state. Social media just gives them more info about your state so they are much more effective at it.
Meta purposely pits extreme sides of every issue you could think of, gender, race, class, religion, even vegan, against each other. Every hate comment is great news for Meta. Hate comments mean that person is engaging so they will feed them more of that content and further drag them into their hateful beliefs. And why do they do that? To show them shirt and knicknack advertisements while they're frothing at the mouth.
Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. He's one of the worst humans on the planet and deserves terrible things to happen to him.
Worth noting by the way that instagram is owned by Meta - the very company the post is calling out.
No, it's not normal. Almost no internet companies around the world try to do anything similar to what Meta did and does. Even if you focus on social media companies, I believe that only a small minority try to do that kind of thing.
For example, here we are on social media. Do you see any targeted advertising? Is it being done by the Lemmy instance? And how many instances are there? Then we could look at Mastodon, or discussion forums, or comment boards, or you name it. Of course you would expect some targeted advertising, like you might find computer advertisements if you're on a computer tech forum, but that's different from targeting users who are in a weak state of mind, precisely because it's targeting their overtly expressed general interests and not their temporary vulnerabilities.
Finally, I think you should go back and read the article. You ranted about companies trying to shove things down your throats, but the article was about how to misuse targeted advertising.
Lemmy is far from normal, it is not profitable as a social media platform and is reliant on donations and generosity.
Google AdSense does similar things to meta, as does amazon. This is far from a misuse, of the technology as that implies that this isn't accomplishing the intended goal, which, aside from laws trying to differentiate children from adults, it does.
Yeah, sorry, but while still going too far, these companies get dwarved by meta when it comes to these practices. I work with certain advertising platforms and know it inside out (don't judge me lol). No way can we target based on emotional state or anything even closely resmlembling that.
Neither google (at least for the first decade or so) or Amazon have such detailed data about you as facebook
Wake me up when something gets done about it other than a fine that amounts to about half a day's profit for them.
They need to be jailed and their companied closed
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