Elon’s Censorial Lawsuit Against Media Matters Inspiring Many More People To Find ExTwitter Ads On Awful Content
from the elon-should-learn-about-the-streisand-effect dept
We’ve already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks they said that such ads regularly appear next to such content, when it only (according to him) rarely appears next to that content, which he admits the site mostly allows.
Of course, there are a few rather large problems with all of this. The first is that the lawsuit admits that what Media Matters observed and said is truthful. The second is that while Elon and his fans keep insisting that the problem is about how often those ads appear next to such content, Media Matters never made any such claim about how frequently such ads showed up, and as IBM noted in pulling its ads, it wants a zero tolerance policy on its ads showing up next to Nazi content, meaning that even if it’s true that only Media Matters employees saw that content, that’s still one too many people.
But there’s a bigger problem: in making a big deal out of this and filing one of the worst SLAPP suits I’ve ever seen, all while claiming that Media Matters “manipulated” things (even as the lawsuit admits that it did no such thing), it is only begging more people to go looking for ads appearing next to terrible content.
And they’re finding them. Easily.
As the DailyDot pointed out, a bunch of users started looking around and found that ads were being served next to the tag #HeilHitler and “killjews” among other neo-Nazi content and accounts. Avi Bueno kicked things off, noting that he didn’t need to do any of the things the lawsuit accuses Media Matters of doing:
Of course, lots of others found similar things, again without any sort of “manipulation,” and, if anything, showing that it was possible to see big name brands show up in ads next to vile content in a manner that is even easier to find than Media Matters ever implied.
Some users started calling for the #ElonHitlerChallenge, asking users to search the hashtag #heilhitler and screenshot that ads they found:
Bizarrely, a bunch of people found that if you searched that hashtag, ExTwitter recommended you follow the fast food chain Jack in the Box.
On Sunday evening I tested this, and it’s true that if you do a search on #heilhitler, and then see who are the “people” it recommends you follow, it lists two authenticated accounts: Jack in the Box and Linda Yaccarino, and then a bunch of accounts with “HeilHitler” either in their username or display name. Cool cool.
Meanwhile, if Musk thought that his SLAPP suits against the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters were somehow going to stop organizations from looking to see if big time company ads are showing up next to questionable content, he seems to have predicted poorly.
A few days after the lawsuit against Media Matters, NewsGuard released a report looking at ads that appeared “below 30 viral tweets that contained false or egregiously misleading information” regarding the Israeli/Hamas conflict. And, well, it’s not good news for companies that believe in trying to avoid having their ads appear next to nonsense.
These 30 viral tweets were posted by ten of X’s worst purveyors of Israel-Hamas war-related misinformation; these accounts have previously been identified by NewsGuard as repeat spreaders of misinformation about the conflict. These 30 tweets have cumulatively reached an audience of over 92 million viewers, according to X data. On average, each tweet was seen by 3 million people.
A list of the 30 tweets and the 10 accounts used in NewsGuard’s analysis is available here.
The 30 tweets advanced some of the most egregious false or misleading claims about the war, which NewsGuard had previously debunked in its Misinformation Fingerprints database of the most significant false and misleading claims spreading online. These include that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel was a “false flag” and that CNN staged footage of an October 2023 rocket attack on a news crew in Israel. Half of the tweets (15) were flagged with a fact-check by Community Notes, X’s crowd-source fact-checking feature, which under the X policy would have made them ineligible for advertising revenue. However, the other half did not feature a Community Note. Ads for major brands, such as Pizza Hut, Airbnb, Microsoft, Paramount, and Oracle, were found by NewsGuard on posts with and without a Community Note (more on this below).
In total, NewsGuard analysts cumulatively identified 200 ads from 86 major brands, nonprofits, educational institutions, and governments that appeared in the feeds below 24 of the 30 tweets containing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war. The other six tweets did not feature advertisements.
As NewsGuard notes, the accounts in question appear to pass the threshold to make money from the ads on their posts:
It is worth noting that to be eligible for X’s ad revenue sharing, account holders must meet three specific criteria: they must be subscribers to X Premium ($8 per month), have garnered at least five million organic impressions across their posts in the past three months, and have a minimum of 500 followers. Each of the 10 super-spreader accounts NewsGuard analyzed appears to fit those criteria.
Hell, NewsGuard even found that the FBI is paying for ads on ExTwitter, and they’re showing up next to nonsense:
For example, NewsGuard found an ad for the FBI on a Nov. 9, 2023, post from Jackson Hinkle that claimed a video showed an Israeli military helicopter firing on its own citizens. The post did not contain a Community Note and had been viewed more than 1.7 million times as of Nov. 20.
This seems especially noteworthy given the false Twitter Files claim (promoted by Elon Musk) that any time the FBI gives a company money, it’s for “censorship.” In that case, the FBI reimbursed Twitter for information lookups, which is required under the law.
Either way, good job, Elon, in filing the world’s worst SLAPP suit against Media Matters, and insisting that their report about big name brands appearing next to awful content was “manipulated,” you’ve made sure that lots of people tested that claim, and found that it was quite easy to see big brand ads next to terrible content.
Filed Under: ads, brand safety, elon musk, hate, misinformation, neonazis
Companies: media matters, newsguard, twitter, x
Comments on “Elon’s Censorial Lawsuit Against Media Matters Inspiring Many More People To Find ExTwitter Ads On Awful Content”
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And yet X/Twitter is better than ever, with more diversity of viewpoint than ever, infinitely less government-directed censorship (of the kind this site preferred), as much or more breaking news content, and plenty of cute cat pictures and animal videos. Sorry, haters!
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You used too many words.
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Unless you count that directed by repressive regimes.
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Fascists love those.
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“Breaking news content” is funny way of spelling “far-right misinformation.”
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You are, in fact, sorry. 1 for 4.
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lol this comment is like an unholy hybrid of a Linda Yaccarino tweet and a Donald Trump tweet
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So…it’s an Elon Musk tweet?
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I dunno, I think it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi unique to his particular personality disorder.
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Remember when Elon happily complied with the Turkish government’s request to censor anti-Erdogan content during its presidential election?
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Are you Turkish, dork? I’m not, so I don’t care what Twitter allegedly did or does for Turkey.
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Of course you don’t. Then you would have to validate hypocrisy which you can’t rationally do. Rational thinking doesn’t go with your tribe as it stands.
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Only Erdogan?
There’s also his simping for Modi and those puff pieces he wrote for Xi..
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Translation: “White people can say the N-word without being banned!”
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For the record, either the N-word is bannable bad or it is not. The idea that it is ok when said by one set of people and bad when said by another set of people is itself racist.
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I see your glorious intellect is on display again. It’s all about context, perhaps look the word up and you may actually learn something.
Now tell me, what’s the difference between using less than flattering names for someone you know and someone you don’t know?
It is very simple concept that eludes people like you, people in the ingroup can call each other names, people outside the group can’t.
I bet you don’t go about using sweet little words on strangers that’s normally reserved for a spouse, do you? Same thing.
Having to tell a grown man this is fucking hilarious.
Re: Re: Re:2 objection
Assumes facts not in evidence.
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Tell me you’ve never heard of the concept of reclaiming slurs without telling me you’ve never heard of the concept of reclaiming slurs.
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To be fair to Matthew, he can’t grasp the nuances of language or how a word’s definition can change over time.
And the only reclaiming he knows is through violent means.
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More visibility of people sharing your viewpoint is not more diversity.
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infinitely less government-directed censorship (of the kind this site preferred)
If you think the gubmint is targeting you and you people, and you’re thinking it must be a conspiracy, consider how many of you dipshits live-streamed your felonies on Jan 6 for all the world to see.
There’s no conspiracy. You people are just fucking stupid.
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…said no real human being, ever.
You just have to wade through Neo-Nazis to get to them.
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And hope that the cat in question is not in a blender.
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No NeoNazis on my feed, but there’s been a surge in Japanese far-right content on mine, so it’s not limited to the English-speaking parts of the site formerly known as Twitter.
Any company still willing to advertise on Twitter despite these findings is a company willing to have itself associated with far-right content. Maybe Elon doesn’t care about that, but I imagine those companies might.
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Given the woke filth cheering piles of Jewish corpses, association with the far right is the needed cure.
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Fascism never solved anything, it is incapable.
When the treatment generates such wealth,
why create a cure?
– big business
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On the contrary, Francoist Spain was a successful fascist regime. It succeeded in destroying the country’s Communists, creating an era of prosperity, and voluntarily transitioning to democracy.
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And stayed neutral during WW2 because it could not properly feed its population, never mind an active army. Also, if fascism had been working, there would have been no transition to democracy.
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It succeeded in fumigating the nun-rapers and priest-killers and ending the epidemic of lawlessness (similar to what we see in Democratic-run cities today). Eventually it fostered an era of economic success, and dictatorship became unnecessary and was voluntarily relinquished.
Pinochet in Chile can also be seen as a moderately successful fascist-adjacent government.
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Yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about. At all. My great-grandparents came here from Franco-ist Spain, and it wasn’t the success you make it out to be.
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Herman it’s past your bedtime hun.
What I find the most disgusting (and this word is not strong enough) is how many companies are still buying ads on this… “social service” (and this expression is not even appropriate enough).
People must know by now that if the Earth would have an arsehole, it would be placed at the very center of X, exactly into Elon mind.
Meanwhile, Linda Yaccarino:
I gotta hand it to her – i couldn’t do it no matter the salary. I mean, not kicking Elmo in the nuts repeatedly for all this garbage.
I don’t get it.
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Non profit finds major companies adverts running alongside Nazi content.
Elon sues, claiming that they don’t and it only happened because Media Matters faked it somehow.
Twitter users look at hashtags that are undeniably far right in nature and get the same result despite what Elon and Linda Puppetino claim in the suit.
And this is why it’s news.
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Advertisers don’t like their ads next to objectionable content, it’s bad for business
Twitter has been telling advertisers their ads won’t show next to objectionable content despite it still being on the site.
This shows advertisers ads still show up next to objectionable content.
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And I get that, but those ads show up next to non-objectionable content too. It’s not like X is specifically making those show up next to the bad stuff, it just isn’t discriminating.
I would give Elon the benefit of the doubt here and say that this is unfair to X, but then he decided to go and SLAPP Media Matters, which puts him in the worst position possible; he looks volatile and stupid to the people who fund his business or anyone who wants to work with him. I still think it’s silly that “people who seek out objectionable content find objectionable content” is being written about, but it at least makes a little more sense with his lolsuit in mind.
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Using an old fable as a comparison the king’s lack of clothes became noteworthy when he hired announcers to boast about how amazing his clothing was and guards to arrest anyone who dared say otherwise.
If advertisers are only still on the site because they believed Elon when he said their ads would not show up next to ‘problematic’ content then people pointing out that he’s not just wrong but laughably wrong is very much worth pointing out.
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The problem is that Elon and Linda both specifically promised advertisers that their content WOULDN’T appear next to objectionable content, and appears to have been blatantly lying about either X’s ability or its WILLINGNESS to actually hold to that promise since. It’s newsworthy that months after saying “IBM ads won’t appear next to Nazi shit anymore”, IBM ads are indeed still appearing next to Nazi shit.
“Objectionable content exists on X” isn’t the story here. “X fails to adhere to promises it made to advertisers about the proximity of their ads to this content” is.
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It doesn’t need to specifically show up next to bad stuff. Advertisers don’t like it regardless (because it’s bad for their image regardless). “just isn’t discriminating” is the problem here, it needs to not show up at all.
There’s a reason other platforms like YT have bans on certain types of content. It’s not because of specifically placed ads, it’s because that content being there at all is unacceptable for advertisers.
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No, it’s not. But it doesn’t have to be, advertisers don’t like it regardless. Because it’s bad for their image, regardless. The “just isn’t discriminating” is the problem, for advertisers. Especially after promises those brands wouldn’t show up next to that content.
There’s a reason other platforms like YT have content rules against things like say, porn or pro-Nazi content. It’s not because of specifically placed ads, it’s because it’s unacceptable for advertisers regardless.
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It doesn’t have to be discriminating, advertisers don’t like it regardless. Because it’s bad for their image, regardless. The “just isn’t discriminating” is the problem, for advertisers. Especially after promises those brands wouldn’t show up next to that content.
There’s a reason other platforms have content rules. It’s not because of specifically placed ads, it’s because it’s unacceptable for advertisers regardless.
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Yeah. That’s the problem.
Re: Re: not necessarily bad
In some cases this may be viewed as appropriate targeting. It is possible that nazis are good prospects for dodgy crypto offerings, unusual digital trading cards, and male enhancement products.
Why would an advertiser object to having his adverts show up right where his audicence is to be found.
Oh, those algoritms!
Reminds me of the discussion about Steve Irwin’s death, where one of the ads that showed up was for life insurance, where a little girl was asking “Daddy, what happens if you die?”
Not quite on the level of neo-nazi, but still a demonstration of bad timing. If you don’t see IBM ads along side Sieg Heil, oerhaps it’s because the algorithm has decided you are not IBM’s target demographic… I’d be more worried about testing the problem by telling the algorithms you want to see Nazi and white power shit.
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Do TechDirt’s advertisers knowingly support the delusion, promulgated by TechDirt and its commenters, that men can be women?
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do at least try to stay on topic, will you?
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The topic is advertisers having their ads appear on a site near content that they may find objectionable. The delusion that men can be women is a dangerous lie that is destructive to society. The delusion that law enforcement is harmful is a dangerous lie that is destructive to society. It would be interesting to know whether the TechDirt advertisers approve of these messages, or don’t know what they’re being placed next to, in the same way that it is interesting to consider this for X.
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…hallucinated no human being, ever.
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Society: “Go away weirdo, we’re just fine.
Nobody has made that ridiculous blanket statement.
And if it bothers them they’re free to leave just like the advertisers on X. You won’t see any self-flagellating SLAPP suits from Techdirt.
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Right, and ads don’t appear on any articles on this site that ever say “men can become women”; there are no articles on this site that make that claim at all, and ads cannot appear near nonexistent articles.
Again, that is a strawman of the pro-trans position. No one says that “men can become women” at all. You’ve been asked multiple times to prove that anyone claims that (with regards to transgender or non-binary people, as opposed to genderfluid people, which is a very different subject), and you’ve consistently failed to provide evidence that actually supports that claim. Drop it.
Except it’s demonstrably true that many members of law enforcement and organizations involved in law enforcement are objectively harmful, so it’s not a delusion or a lie at all. As for a claim that law enforcement as a general idea is inherently harmful—which is the only way to parse “law enforcement is harmful” that would be untrue—Techdirt has never made that claim, anyways.
At any rate, this is irrelevant since your original comment never mentioned law enforcement at all, so this in no way makes that original comment on-topic. Seriously, are you completely incapable of staying on-topic?
Since the message “men can be women” (or “men can become women”) doesn’t appear anywhere on this site at all except when you mention it or others point out that no one says that, it doesn’t matter whether or not Techdirt advertisers would approve of that message.
The message “law enforcement is harmful”—to the extent it actually appears on this site—is demonstrably, objectively true, making it categorically different from racist/antisemitic content and demonstrably, objectively false claims about the Hamas-Israel war or COVID, and so isn’t comparable to the objectionable content found on Twitter that’s at issue here. (Also, again, it wasn’t in your original comment, so the point is moot; you were supposed to be supporting the comment you already made, not simply add more that you think is easier to support.)
Also, the difference is that the advertisers on Twitter already explicitly said they would remove ads if Twitter let their ads appear next to objectionable content before Media Matters did this research, and Twitter specifically promised that those ads wouldn’t appear next to objectionable content. As far as I’m aware, no such promise was made with regards to advertising on Techdirt.
So no, you’re conflating apples and oranges here.
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Re: Re: Re:2
The woke filth routinely says “transwomen are women,” so I don’t know who you think will believe your gaslighting. There is also no such thing as a “gender-fluid” person; gender and sex are the same, and people are only ever the sex of their bodies.
The woke filth routinely said “defund the police” and meant what they said until they discovered just how much this made them hated. “Law enforcement is harmful” is true to the same extent as “Muslims are terrorists”. You can find many examples of each, but extending that to the entire group is done for political purposes.
The trans delusion is destructive to society in the same way as Lysenkoism was; it demands that everyone adhere to and affirm lies, especially including scientists who are pressured financially, physically, and reputationally into never stating the (obvious) truth. But reality cares nothing for what people say about it, and people believing lies about the world will step out of windows thinking they can fly.
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You rantings sound exactly like our towns former resident nutcase although he was ranting about the mayor using traffic-lights to make people gay and how it was a woke conspiracy.
At least his relatives managed to get him the help he needed before he did something really stupid aside from smashing some of the lights.
Seek help
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That’s not saying “men can be women”, so I don’t see the issue.
Whether or not you recognize their claims as legitimate, they do exist, like it or not.
No, they aren’t.
No one is disputing this.
None of this is relevant unless you can prove that people here said and meant that. And even then, it’s still moving the goalposts since you were only talking about the “men can be women” thing when you were called out.
It’s also wrong, and you also are ignoring the fact that it was with regards to specific departments.
And the thing is that, again, Techdirt never made such a blanket statement, and it’s still irrelevant because that wasn’t in your initial comment.
That is, if you just make up nonsense about it that isn’t even remotely true, it’s harmful to society. Still, again, you’re going off-topic: The issue is that you haven’t demonstrated that this site is doing that, so the argument is entirely moot.
The lack of self-awareness you display here is painful, but again, my point is that you still haven’t connected any of this to Techdirt, so the point is still moot.
Believing one lie doesn’t mean they’ll believe any lie. Like you: there are many lies you don’t believe, but you continue to believe lies about transgender people and their supporters. But I digress.
Again, I’m not interested in discussing what random people you don’t like say or do; this is about Techdirt. Stop going off on tangents and stay focused for once in your life.
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Opinions so popular you can’t even use your own fake name.
My how the dumbass has fallen.
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Ah, isn’t amazing that the only place on the internet where you can spew your shit is on a site you hate. I’m sure it’s doing wonders for your mental health. Keep it up and you’ll eventually get that nice private room with free medication.
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Your obsession with genitalia is most telling.
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Of course Mike knows about the very scientific basis behind gender dysphoria, Hyman.
Your anti-knowledge bullshit has to fucking stop, but knowing you and the NeoNazi things that keep doing this harassment campaign, there’s no legal way to get you to stop.
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Gender dysphoria is a mental illness in which people believe they are a sex different from their body. It’s much like anorexia. Sane people do not treat the delusions of the mentally ill as if they are real.
And now we see the results of not fighting against falsehood from the moment it rears its head. People who are permitted, without pushback, to believe and proclaim that men can be women are the same people who cheer for rape, murder, and kidnapping in the name of freedom when the victims are Jews. It’s the same delusion that had American Communists supporting Stalin as he murdered millions.
Wokeness is poison. Wokeness is death.
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No, it is not. Gender dysphoric people don’t claim their sex to be different from their body. This has been pointed out to you multiple times.
Gender dysphoria is a state of severe discomfort due to the disparity between what their body is (which they are all too aware of) and what their brains say it should be.
It is nothing like anorexia, which is the delusion that their body is fatter than it actually is.
Also incorrect, but at any rate, people with gender dysphoria aren’t delusional to begin with. You just continue to (deliberately or not) misinterpret what they actually believe.
Which is why we keep pointing out that what you say about what gender dysphoria and transgender are is entirely false.
i.e. Nobody
Why do you lie? Most pro-trans people don’t cheer for any of that.
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Why do you keep on trying to tell everybody how to treat other people when you have no credentials or experience in dealing with transgender people? That is how religious fanatics fuck up countries.
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Fanatics, regardless of their beliefs, fucks everything up if they get the chance, and good ol’ Herman here is certainly a fanatic on top of being a sociopath.
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Fanatics have more in common with religion than reality, as the act on their belief system while ignoring reality.
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The usual fallacy of the Courtiers Reply. It is not necessary to be a tailor in order to proclaim that the emperor is naked.
Re: Re: Re:3
Ah, so you don’t know what the fallacy actually means.
The fallacy is pointing out to a critic that he hasn’t sufficient knowledge to make the criticism to start with.
Pointing out that what someone says doesn’t actually adhere to established (and verifiable) facts and coming to the conclusion that the person actually don’t understand or haven’t the requisite knowledge to understand, that’s not a courtier’s reply fallacy.
So using your words for what was actually done: It is not necessary to be a tailor to tell someone who is making ludicrous claims about clothes to take their shit elsewhere.
Re: Re: Re:4
No, the fallacy is believers demanding that non-believers study the fantasies and apologetics written by the believers before declaring that those fantasies are false (with the assumption that the non-believers just don’t understand what the believers believe, and will change their minds when they study those works). So, you can’t be an atheist if you haven’t studied Aquinas, things like that. It’s nonsense and sophistry.
Men cannot be women. Women cannot be men. People are only ever the sex of their bodies. Gender and sex are the same. People who don’t like the sex of their body and profoundly wish it was otherwise can have alterations applied to themselves, but those will not change what sex they are. No one can “know” they are a different sex than their body, because people have internal access only to their own minds and bodies, and to the extent that all men or all women share experience, it is through the framework of their unalterable physical sex.
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Again, setting aside genderfluid people, no one is claiming otherwise.
Ib id
False. That you use the terms interchangeably doesn’t mean that everyone else has to do likewise.
Given today’s technology, that is true; it is also irrelevant.
No trans person claims to know they are a different sex than their body. They claim to know that their gender doesn’t match their sex.
Yes. So how can you claim to understand their minds and brains better than they do?
Yeah, no, they don’t. Intersex people are a thing, and the same goes for sterility, apparent sex (some cis women are indistinguishable from most cis men, and vice versa), and other things that can affect their experiences. You have yet to explain how to categorize them into men or women in such a way that sex is still binary where that statement would be true. Unless you agree that there is no extent where “all men or all women share experience”, including through their physical sex, making the point moot since it just means that the division is arbitrary.
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Do you know that neither Techdirt nor its commenters ever said that? And that that’s also entirely off-topic?
Follow-up with the companies
Let’s keep following up with the companies and see their reactions to all of these screen shots. Maybe companies like Temu won’t care, but what about everyone else?
I’d like see how many companies announce they’re pulling their advertising also.
And I’d like to see what Musk says to his investors as advertisers flee the platform.
And I’d like to see how many investors demand their money back before X loses all of its value.
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I’d like to know why progressive-minded people think they can retain their integrity and stay on that platform.
I’d like to know why journals keeps embedding xeets in their articles and using xitter as a sharing platform.
And I’d like to know why people keep giving attention to the trolls that come on this site in order to disrupt and garner attention for themselves. Ignore them and stop breathing life into them, they won’t stay if they don’t get any attention (assuming the site continues to refuse to block them permanently). You’re not doing gawd’s work, you’re preventing sane and rational people from joining interesting discussions by endlessly defending yourselves against known trolls.
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Maybe they have contact/support networks that rely on Twitter to stay in touch. Couple that with the inertia needed to move to a new platform and the real possibility that not everyone in their network will move to the new platform, and that seems like a damn good reason to stay on Twitter despite [gestures in Elon Musk’s general direction].
Other platforms aren’t as popular and Bluesky isn’t available to the general public yet. Couple that with the inertia needed to change habits such as embedding posts from Twitter and there’s a good argument to be made that news outlets choosing to avoid Twitter altogether are not making a wise decision.
Some of us can’t help ourselves. Not sayin’ that to justify or glorify that behavior; just sayin’ it to tell the truth.
I do, however, take offense to the idea that I’m neither sane nor rational. The assholes who come in here and do their sockpuppet routines with the “I’m so far left that I shit Pride flags” schtick and the “I’m so far right that I think the whole world should be genocided” schtick? They’re the ones who deserve to be called “insane and irrational”. I’m not a mentally stable person—as I’m always willing to admit, I have more issues than a GamePro archive—but I’m also not doing anonymous sockpuppet shitposting and expressing positions like “queer people are gonna rape and genocide all you straight white shitheads (and possibly not even in that order)” or “it’s okay to kill children as long as they’re not white (and especially if they’re Muslim)”.
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As one of the anonymous posters, I point out again that I am anonymous to prevent my comments from being stuck for long periods of time in the moderation queue when I post while logged in. If the site owner chose to modify that policy, I would post under my name again.
It’s OK to kill children of any color when they are collateral damage in a war started by an enemy. Fuck around and find out.
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Human beings neither speak nor act the way you do.
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If you had stopped bringing up transgender people or similar topics on articles that don’t mention them, then maybe you wouldn’t have been so restricted in the first place.
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I am so restricted because the site owner pretends to believe in freedom of speech, but likes all the workarounds that silence speech he dislikes. That includes having large private generic speech platforms censor opinions based on viewpoint, and it includes placing barriers in the way of commenting here in the hope that people will stop posting opinions whose viewpoints he dislikes.
I don’t know why he believes that anonymous comments are better than signed-in ones, but it’s his site. He can do whatever he wants.
Re: Re: Re:4 You somehow managed to get kicked out of the klan for being too racist
That’s just pathetic Herman. Here you are complaining you lost a battle of intelligence to a spam filter. This on a site you profess to hate. Because literally no one else will put up with your bigotry. I used to think blueballs was a sad sack of shit. But you take the racist self hating homosexual cake bro.
Re: Re: Re:4
Nobody cares what you think, Hyman, because you are a TERRORIST.
Re: Re: Re:4
You haven’t been silenced, you don’t have a barrier in place of you posting, you’re posting right now. You’re just crying because people don’t worship your opinion, and you have to justify it by claiming you’re suffering from a tyrant when it’s just people are tired of you being an asshole in their presence.
Re: Re: Re:4
This isn’t about viewpoints he dislikes. It’s about posting hateful comments regarding a completely unrelated subject over and over again as well as repeatedly misrepresenting what those who disagree with you say. It’s also about what the community at large here has a problem with, not just Mike. Keep in mind that you are literally the only person who has received this treatment.
Again, stop bringing up transgender people when the article has nothing to do with them. It’s literally the least you can do.
As for him thinking anonymous comments are better than signed-in ones, he doesn’t. It’s hardly his fault that you refuse to take the hint and change your behavior in any way.
Re: Re: Re:2
You post anonymously to harass the site. That’s technically a you problem, but considering your side has zero qualms actually murdering human beings to get your way, you have revoked your complaining privileges forever.
And as for “fuck around and find out*, the same applies to you.
Just a reminder, Hitler was just as genocidal and anti-knowledge as you.
Re: Re: Re:2
“ It’s OK to kill children…”
There’s those opinions so popular literally none of your family will talk to you.
Re: Re: Re:
Blah, blah, blah, apologism, blah, blah, blah.
Re: Re: Re:
One of the problems is that none of you are very good at arguing and debating. The trolls are the tails and you are the dog, they wag you and play you over and over and over to the detriment of truly great discourse, quite often driving away others who may want to join in the discussion but because it’s been hijacked by trolls, never enter the conversation.
The first problem is that you ALWAYS respond to them, and that puts THEM in the driver’s seat, NOT you. They ALWAYS use logical fallacies, and you ALWAYS reply to their logical fallacies, so they are effectively driving you away from the actual and meat of the discussion.
Learn some fucking logic, there’s a great site called yourlogicalfallacyis.com and it’s a fantastic resource. If you refuse to do anything but breathe life into them, at least take the upper road and argue with them on logic’s terms, not theirs. Otherwise you all just look like tools the trolls use and abuse over and over again.
Re: Re: Re:2
Look, if you don’t like the way the comments sections go down here, nothing is stopping you from using uBlock Origin or Stylus or some other extension that lets you hide content (one way or another) to hide the comments sections. And if you don’t like me personally, I’m sure there’s a userscript or userstyle out there that can take care of that problem without hiding the rest of the comments. Point is: You have a point, but you’re gonna need more than that to stop the comments from going in directions you don’t like because of people you don’t like (myself included).
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Re: Re: Re:3
More apologism, you really are terrible at discourse, but this wasn’t about you personally, it’s YOU who keep bringing it around to your mirror.
Re: Re: Re:4
Shh honey the adults are talking.
Re: Re: Re:4
I find that a little hard to believe.
Re: Re: Re:2
<—— doors that way bro
Re: Re: Re:3
“That’s not a prism through which you’re viewing life, it’s a fucking mirror.”
Nice “our way or the highway” trolling, I find that always promotes productive discourse. 😉
Re: Re: Re:4
It’s just more concise and to the point than the post it was an answer to, which was very longwinded about how everyone commenting here are dumb and wrong, and they should all behave in a matter that the poster approves of or shut up – which is kind of stupid if you want to promote a productive discourse.
Re: Re: Re:4 First I would like to thank the academy
Thank you. Trolling idiots like you, is generally its own reward. But it is nice to get the recognition occasionally.
Re: Re: Re:2
One of the other problems you don’t mention is that quite often the trolls are met by hyper-argumentative types who themselves refuse to relinquish control of threads, preferring instead to argue relentlessly (badly to poorly of course) ad nauseam. It becomes a battle of egos in a witless vs. clueless never ending war on discourse.
Re: Re: Re:2
If we don’t shout the straight white trash down, they win. Is that what you want? Do you want to go back to the days before gay marriage was approved in this country? Because I sure as fuck don’t.
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Re: Re:
No. I fucking refuse. The fact that they exist is why I can’t marry my boyfriend or adopt a kid in a country that still panders to your trash government. You are TERRORISTS. And I will not fucking negotiate with TERRORISTS.
Re: Re: Re:
It is fortunate for that putative child that you are not allowed to adopt them.
Re: Re: Re:2
Nah, I say let the guy cook. If he genuinely believes that children brought up by two men are more well-adjusted then for the sake of the children, I say let them prove it. It’s not as though they’ve been found to have problems in school life or anything, and for those who do experiences issues, blaming heteronormativity is always an option. It’s certainly never stopped them before.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s not about two gay men in general, just this guy in particular. Very few gay couples are so perverse as to use their adopted children for child pornography, for example. This guy just seems like an angry dude, and would probably verbally and physically abuse his child when the inevitable parent-child conflicts arose.
Re: Re: appreciating those faster on the fingers
Not sure. Personally, I appreciate those folks who are faster to the articles and comments, and who flag the trolls so that they do not appear on my screen.
I also have foolish and unfounded hopes that ``flag” will be fixed so that it works as it did on the old site, without need for javascript.
Re: Re:
slaves to habit. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing about twitter is so unique that someone can’t stand up a clone overnight. I’m sure the entire source code is available to people outside the company if they literally want to stand up a copy of it.
We live in a really fucked world. Human beings are not really all thinking all the time. Most are not thinking at all any of the time.
Right for all the wrong reasons
So it turns out Elon was right, Media Matters’ article was deceptively misleading!
It is way easier than they were making it out to be to find that sort of vile content next to ads for major companies.
A while back it seemed like the goal behind Internet advertising was to personalize advertising to the indivodual so as to disassociate the notion that the content an ad appears next to is an endorsement by the company of the content.
Sometime around the mid-2010’s this seemed to change. Brand safety was considered paramount. An enormous swath of content on the Internet was considered unwelcome if it contained so much as a swear word or blood (regardless of context). Among this brand safety craze came demonization of bigoted content, but that was a small slice of the much larger swath of expression that has become persona-non-grata on much of the modern Internet.
Cheering Elon’s loss in this lawsuit, as stupid and capriciously bigoted as he is, feels like an endorsement of brand safety being the primary gatekeeper of permissible content on Internet user-generated-content platforms.
Re:
I’m curious why you would think the people who are spending money shouldn’t have control over the use of their content when negotiating a contract? What other rights are you thinking to strip of parties in a contract? Liquidated Damages?
You’re also incredibly wrong with your main premise. The concept of Brand Safety predates the internet by like…..a 150 years or so. It was just easier to do in print because every decision was made by a person, and all the content was either written or edited (usually both) by a person who could evaluate it.
Re: Re:
I’m curious how you so wildly misinterpreted my post as to call into question either my ability to explain my thoughts or your reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say people spending the money shouldn’t have control over the use of their content when negotiating a contract. But the concern regarding brand safety is almost never out of moral umbrage on the part of the advertiser but rather moral umbrage on the part of (presumed) consumers. Oftentimes this isn’t even out of concern for outrage from actual concerns but of what is assumed consumers may be offended by. This can also be extremely out-dated such as with regards to a lot of profanity and mild amounts of blood. As it stands you have videos regarding gutting fish being censored on Youtube due to fear of being de-monetized.
Maximizing freedom of expression and discourage advertisers from (effectively) being the gatekeepers of free expression would require changing societal norms by disassociating the notion of an advertiser endorsing the content their ad appeared next to. This would of course require more than just the perception of advertisers to change but society at large. For the longest time I’d assumed that was the goal with Google and other ad platforms creating profiles of people. I’d assumed there was a change to have ads associated with people regardless of the content they viewed.
I’m just sad brand safety is such an extreme focus these days. The bland-inization of user-generated-content platforms is just sad.
Again, I am puzzled as to how you so wildly misinterpreted my post. No where did I say brand safety is a new concept. Just that it has had a renewed and rather extreme focus that was most certainly not typical within the past several decades.
Re: Re: Re:
A distinction without difference because the end result is the same, a brand has been associated with something negative.
You are of course free to place yourself in situations where people starts associating you with nazis or other people which has reprehensible views.
Brand safety is just an extension of not wanting to be associated with certain things, arguing that consumers must learn to disassociate a brand name from what appears next to it is arguing that we must change human nature.
And I find it hilarious that you think free expression hinges how and where ads are displayed. This is just another way to put forward the idea of free reach at others expense.
Here’s an idea, if you don’t like how things are done make your own platform that allows things that aren’t considered bland. I can’t guarantee that’ll you make any money from ads if no one want to be associated with the content though.
Re: Re:
You’re using a lot of words to say “We shouldn’t worry about Nazis getting support from advertisers, everyone else should change.”
Which is even more absurd than what I read in your original post.
You also make a lot of assumptions that are incorrect.
Re:
it seemed like the goal behind Internet advertising was to personalize advertising to the individual so as to disassociate the notion that the content an ad appears next to is an endorsement by the company of the content.
No? The goal was saving money. Instead of having to pay to advertise to everyone who watches the deadliest catch, you could just pay to advertise to the 5% of them who actually fish and so might buy your fishing rods and tackle. That was it.
Frankly, I’m not sure where you’re getting the whole idea from. While there was certainly a period where nobody really tracked exactly what was on the specific pages where display ads appeared, that was just down to technical incompetence, not intentional action. Websites which specifically catered to areas of perceived public controversy never had an easy time selling ad space, because large advertisers never wanted to be associated with that content. They just didn’t have the technical ability to detect the less obvious cases.
The difference today is the technical competence to track this data and correct it is now widespread, resulting in both companies and media organizations more rapidly identifying when ads appear near such content and doing something about it.
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Kill yourself, fag.
Re:
I think we found a lazy terrorist.
Re:
We know it’s you Herman.
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Re:
You’re going to enjoy the taste of big black cock, Hyman, even if I have to snap your Trump whore jawbone in half to do it.
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Mike Masnick Malding Again
So you have discovered Whack a Mole with keywords?
Why do you think Dalle3 is finding it impossible to stop people from making offensive images? Why do you think that the chinese communist party has to ban “whinnie the pooh”. The answer is that there is no way you can keyword ban every bad idea, because there are infinite ways of expressing an idea.
Re:
Even if that is the case: The fact that pro-Nazi content can be found so easily through Twitter’s search functions—and that such content can regularly be found sitting next to advertising—is a massive problem for Twitter. Brands aren’t going to want to associate themselves with a site whose owner allows pro-Nazi content to be placed next to advertising from said brands.
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Go eat a cactus, lefty! I hope Media Matters rots into extinction!
Re:
That was so bad you that don’t even get a participation-prize.
Google Does It Too
https://adalytics.io/blog/search-partners-transparency
This report says that the Google advertising network is also putting big brand ads on pornographic or other unsuitable websites.
It’s the usual thing. There are billions of ad placements that need to be handled in milliseconds, so they have to be handled by machine. Machines are not capable of accurately detecting all unsuitable placements. So anyone who goes looking for inappropriate placements will find them. Advertisers can either suck it up and realize that they will never have the kind of control they want, or they can stop advertising.
It’s all nonsense anyway. The people who are seeing objectionable content organically, because that’s what they want, aren’t going to care that ads for big brands are showing up too. The people who don’t want to see the objectionable content aren’t going to see it. What’s left is people who want to deny the authors of the objectionable content the ability to speak freely, so they deliberately seek out these ad placements to cause bad publicity so that the objectionable content will be censored.