The biggest media corporations are allowed to advertise literal crime. Meanwhile saying the word cigarette on tv will get you jail time.
Smoke
Are you smoking yet?
I am smoking. Inside.
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Wtf does their browser history look like to be getting those sorts of ads?!
In the article he states that he kept clicking on those ads on purpose, in order to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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I saw that double post ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I would be very curious to see the algorithm adapting to that:
User: click on shrooms ad
AI: Oh he likes shrooms with his cocaine! Let’s try a marijuana to snort with his cocaine.
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These are probably the “random” ads iPhone users get because of the “Ask not to track” feature.
Surely these are at least partly honeypots for law enforcement, right?
Some, sure. I asked my weed dealer to show me a bit on how this works. You’d be amazed at how much dealing is done over clearnet on FB messenger, whatsapp, etc. Little to no technical security. Selling drugs online has become much more mainstream than it was during the $10 bitcoin days. Not that I’d personally use clearnet for drugs, but that’s where a ton of deals are happening. This article only confirms what I’ve already seen.
Yep, so much stuff that used to be on TOR moved to discord. Then if they are smart they use Signal or Session, but I have heard of a lot of stuff just straight on FB… it’s crazy. I guess with that many transactions, it’s a really though game of whackamole. Especially since the internet made it much easier to deal drugs without needing to hold huge quantities at once.
How would one find the discord groups so I can be sure to stay away from them?
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That wock is absolutely fent, and with those prices, that LSD is probably 25i.
The DMT seems legit tho
Easy, just delete Instagram.
Well, Instagram did just that for my little book publishing company. I signed up for a business account in the hopes of selling some books, putting up some ads, and posting a few updates, only to get a fucking PERMABAN during fucking SIGNUP.
So you are right and it really is super easy.
(ffs i should’ve sold drugs damnit)
ITT: People who are so quick to suggest ad blockers they miss the point of the conversation.
I don’t get it why and how they get away. I mean I do get it, but it’s astonishing the amount of the shit these big corporations get away with. They’re pretty much profiting from crime and nobody does anything against them.
If criminals are advertising the crimes they are committing, I don’t imagine law enforcement are going to be falling all over themselves to put a stop to it, because it makes their job a lot easier.
Sure, assuming that their job is filling beds in prison rather than actually reducing crime.
The job of law enforcement is enforcing the law. Enforcing the law is supposed to discourage people from breaking it.
Does it work? I would guess that it is more effective than not enforcing the law.
Is it the best way to reduce crime? I doubt it.
But conceivably they could be enforcing the law by putting pressure on these companies to stop facilitating advertising of illegal services and thereby the flow of business. If they instead just don’t bother with that so that they can use these ads to pick out and track down the juiciest, lowest effort prosecution targets, representing a small proportion of the total market, that’s pure corruption with little to no social benefit.
To be clear I don’t actually know if this is what is going on, but if it was it would be reprehensible.
I think I agree.
Are law enforcement actually doing it? Because if they were people were not always making those ads.
it’s astonishing
people still not blocking ads, use adblock!
If you use the app there’s no blocking it sadly. What people should start doing it’s stop using that platform all together
I use an alternative side-loaded Instagram app called Instander which blocks ads and comes with other nice features. I don’t use the platform much anyhow, but when I do it makes the experience actually tolerable.
No, what people should start doing is demanding that governments actually enforce the law against Facebook for acting as an accomplice to the myriad crimes the article discusses. Facebook should be dissolved and executives should go to prison.
ReVanced says they support removing timeline ads from Instagram. I don’t use Instagram, so I haven’t tested it, though.
Pihole oughta do it.
PiHole doesn’t work when ads and legitimate content are both served from same domain.
That is true, didn’t think about that.
People use the app, have their info exploited and than complain this is the only way to use a service that is exploiting your clicks, and yet, you don’t stop using it, really weird.
eh, I’m a photographer/videographer. sadly I more or less need to use it if I want anyone to find me…
People shouldn’t be forced to use a adblocker for a platform to be usable.
As opposed to when?
At what point in internet history do you think website advertising was tolerable? Because in my eyes, it’s always been an aggressive obstacle to usability, since the dial-up era.
I mean, you either pay the service so you don’t have to watch ads (like YouTube Premium) or you see ads that aren’t criminal behaviour or spam.
Either way, I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every service in the internet should be both free and ad free.
Movie piracy can be both, and it’s straight-up illegal. Hosting text is nothing in comparison. Images and video snippets are barely more than that. If all a website provides is bandwidth and storage, we all have that in spades, and if a website can’t let us share it, then a website is the wrong model.
Running a glorified chat server and image board in the year two thousand and fifty gigabits should not be remarkable. You are currently on a service patched together by randos hosting servers for fun. It replaces a website which, despite strenuous effort, made fuck-all revenue from a highly constructive and ordered community of millions.
I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every website needs to make money. Some worthwhile and widely-desired things simply lose money, and that’s fine. Expecting to monetize your family would be gross. Expecting to monetize community is not much better, and equally fruitless. Squeezing any blood from that stone requires some fundamental betrayals of what those relationships mean and why people seek them.
Social media sites only turned a profit when they undermined democracy. Advertising is propaganda for sale. If you think capitalism prevents us from even talking to one another without being gouged for the privilege or subjected to destabilizing abuse, then torches and pitchforks are on your left.
Similarly, my YouTube shorts are filled with gambling videos and “get rich quick scheme” videos. Seems as though “do not recommend channel” blocks the channel but assumes you have some growing interest in the topic.
I just want to watch woodworking shorts and plumbing videos T_T
Maybe do Not Interested and then Do not recommend channel?
Unless doing the former just hides the video immediately and doesn’t let you do the latter, in which case just call me a fool.
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Has changing your preferences from https://adssettings.google.com helped?
Doesn’t seem to have, no. I’ve had all that stuff turned off for ages on my account, and you can also turn it off to a limited extent on a single browser even if you’re not signed in.
I just got an extension that removes shorts. I tried blocking channels, saying I wasn’t interested, pressing the thumbs down button, but it would still show trash like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
im getting the wrong type of ads lol
Yeah I just get fed with bullshit on ADHD and Autism nonstop.
This shit’s going on in centralized big-name websites, while Lemmy instances fret about discussing piracy and ban people for being impolite to bigots.
I fucking hate the modern web.
You don’t hate the modern web. You hate people.
No I definitely hate many disparate elements of the modern web. Browsers are controlled by an advertising giant that can’t even operate a decent search engine anymore. Legislators are still trying to demonize pornography, of any kind, as if two adults fucking in private is child exploitation… somehow. Every website that centralized disparate forums / galleries / chatrooms simultaneously went pants-on-head crazy in a panicked frenzy to make N+1 dollars.
I also hate people who demand “be polite!” without viciously cracking down on actual trolls saying stupid shit to bait blunt correction. And those trolls, obviously. It doesn’t have to be exclusive. There’s plenty to go around.
I felt the same way but with the Reddit thing I started switching up some of my sites.
Have you used any of the SearX instances? Works just as well as google for the most part
I have now, and I’m underwhelmed. As a test case I used a repeated failure point for Google and DDG: ‘“Apple I” keyboard’. As in, keyboards for the Apple I, which came before the Apple II. (I have some very stupid hobbies.) Major search engines overwhelmingly return Apple iWhatever keyboards, or just Apple keyboards in general, with occasional vintage or retro hardware tossed in. The handful of SearX instances I tried returned nothing.
Have you tried Apple 1 instead of I?
Yeah for niche stuff it’s not going to perform well (yet) sadly but 1 day!
Now here’s the exact problem with the so called “personalized” ads, that Google and Facebook serves what the advertisers think you want to see, instead of what you actually want to see.
This is the fundamental conflict of interest which the obvious conclusion is that online banner/video advertisements doesn’t work, and has never worked, because ultimately, no matter how many times you shove ads in people’s faces via a thoughtless machine, you can’t “trick” people into liking something. What people want is thoughtful, sincere recommendations by real people, which is why we have seen the rise of sassy brand Twitter accounts being so successful for a time: because there is a real person behind it.
(Of course, it’s really funny if you take blatant advertisment to its logical extreme, and even that seemed more effective.)
Of course, Google and Facebook will never admit that they’ve been lying to everyone and themselves for more than a decade, because to do so is to admit that their entire business of Web 2.0 was built on an absurd and illogical premise of again, if you show people ads for things they never asked for a thousand times, then you can brainwash them into liking something.
In other words, Google and Facebook’s entire advertisment business model, if you really think about it, is really no different than pick-up artist logic, and. They. Just. Won’t. Go. Away.
Turns out though you can absolutely trick them into believing conspiracy theories with social media ads.
Learn the TRUTH about this thing you’re already primed for by your bias!
click
Holy crap! He’s a alien! U cud tell frum the eyez! 👁️👁️👀👽
You can absolutely trick people into liking drugs too
Fuuuuuuck the Sacklers.
Pretty much every industry works by tricking people into liking things.
Like the razors with four+ blades on them, people buy them cause the commercials say “more blades is better”.
People wouldn’t seek out extra blades if they weren’t tricked into liking it. They are objectively worse than single blade razors.
Exactly. If it didn’t pay off these companies wouldn’t keep shoveling money to Facebook and Google to show their ads time and time again. Marketing is expensive. If it didn’t at least break even then nobody would be doing it anymore by now. Obviously it works, otherwise I wouldn’t ever know what the fuck a squarespace or a goddamn raid shadow legends is.
The ads that I mind the least and the ones I find the most effective are sponsors for creators that I like. Short sponsor segments really don’t annoy me as much and I have actually tried a couple products that have advertised that way.
That said, almost all of them sucked in the end but that’s another subject entirely.
You’re clearly a known customer for those products :p The algorithm is never wrong…
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I may or may not have acquired exactly the acid in those pics.
I definitely did not.
Or did I?
It looks identical actually and I’m willing to bet it came from the same place.
If I actually had it that is.
lucky 😮💨 all mine are weight loss scams and laptop deals
Drugs or Chinese scam products. Had a friend tell me he ordered something that never showed up, turned out they sent these super cheap toothbrushes in the mail and then tried to use that tracking info as proof he received what he bought. They just allow anyone who will pay to advertise illegal shit, scams, whatever it’s the wild West.
Pixelfed
Ain’t that many thots there. Could be a good it bad thing.
U saying there’s an untapped market? 😏
If only there was a Pixelfed instance that hosted OnlyFans, Cosplayers, and random exhibitionists. Everyone else could just subscribe to it.
Oooohhh nooooooo!~ :3
