Facebook approved 75% of ads threatening US election workers Just before the US midterm elections last month, researchers from non-profit Global Witness and New York University submitted ads containing death threats against election workers to Meta's Facebook, Google's YouTube, and TikTok. YouTube and TikTok caught the policy-violating ads, removed them, and suspended the associated …
It sounds like the same source as the emails that everyone is getting, telling them that their password has expired and can be renewed by following a link, or they get an email with the InvoiceDetailsDec.ace, Specifications_pdf.exe, etc., attachments that must be opened. These are all criminal activities that are common daily these days but we are acting like it's not a crime to do everything that this story documents because it's only "political"?
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The five minutes of actual "person sitting at a desk reporting on things that happened" news that runs at the top of the hour is generally accurate, even on Fox News. (These are the people that in 2020 correctly called the election for Biden when they reported him as the projected winner in Arizona and are generally true journalists with ethics and morals and everything.)
However, the other 55 minutes in each hour contain nothing but lies and also lies because they are "editorial" shows. These are NOT news - these are purely entertainment shows where "hosts" shout opinions at "guests" that agree and shout them right back at the "host" all while the people watching incorrectly believe that "this is the news - this is all true because it is on TV and I already agree with the things they are saying."
To be fair, ALL of the cable news networks are hot garbage - their sole purpose is to attract eyeballs so they can sell advertising space.
They don't care about being correct & they don't need to tell the truth. Some of them think they need to be as motherfucking crazy as possible because crazy gets more people watching so more money for ads.
The news used to lose money for broadcast companies; reporting on the events of the day is expensive and most people don't watch it so ad revenue was low. The broadcast companies tended to view the news programs a fulfilling a social obligation to inform the populace and help ensure a well informed electorate. In the 70s and early 80s, Rupert Murdoch (among others) started a push for the news to be profitable. But the only way to make them profitable is to reduce costs and/or increase revenue. You can only fire so many people and still make a show so in order to increase ad revenue they started being more sensational - "if it bleeds, it leads." Crime reporting is visceral and emotional but its main benefit is that it is cheap - "Action News" vans show up at a murder scene, interview some rando, throw in some B-roll and you have a 5 minute segment that cost basically nothing but attracts eyeballs. However that only goes so far, so when the pivot was made to the 24 hour "news" network they needed another 22+ hours of content that didn't exist - thus the birth of the modern "editorial" shout fest.
America used to have something called the Fairness Doctrine - if you had an editorial expressing, say, a Liberal point of view then the network was obligated to provide equal time and access to a Conservative point of view. In the late 1980s Radio networks wanted to run Rush Limbaugh's show (and other similar shows) but that would require them to ALSO air a show espousing alternate views. In several markets, Rush's show was highly profitable for them but the other shows they would be required to air were not. So the FCC under Ronald Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine and here we are with the most popular "news" network's most popular show is a guy looking perpetually vaguely confused (like you just told him his pants were made of cheese) and repeating the worst lies and dog-whistle nonsense to try and gaslight his viewers.
As far as I can see, the rare times I use FB without a complete series of adblockers (fb purity, ublock origin, disconnect, etc), there are a lot of paid ads that are "agasint the rules" (LOL!). If I posted something like that, I'd be punished. But since ads means money, they can go on scamming people and breaking "community rules" (LOL again).
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I haven't used Facebook in about 5 years, but when I was a user almost all the ads I saw were dodgy in some way. I was only on there for family party invites and photos, so obviously not a valuable user to be targeted by legitimate brands. I provided very little info for them to use.
But when I looked most of the adverts were for obvious scams, like you are the millionth person to see our advert and have won a free iPad. Or they were for "dating" sites to meet unfeasibly attractive Russian girls - presumably for the purposes of obtaining money or a better passport in exchange for the obvious.
As a legitimate advertiser that would put me right off using Facebook. I wouldn't want my expensive brand advertising sat next to that lot. Although I don't recall ever seeing any advertising from any company I recognised, so maybe Facebook do a good job of segregating their good accounts from the bottom-feeder ads, and then just show the really cheap crap ads to the low-value accounts and bots for those vital extra pennies they can make?
Five seconds looking at the GlobalWitness.org website reveals them to be far left political activists.
I don't even need to look at the the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy organisation to know they will be the same.
Both organisations calling for censorship.
Youtube has a banner on the 2022 World Government Summit videos to tell you that the idea of a world government is a conspiracy theory.
Biden went on TV and said that if you got vaccinated you wouldn't get sick and you wouldn't die. That is a lie. Is anyone going to ban him and his organisation?
Didn't think so. So who get's to decide "the truth"?
Yes, we have a cure for misinformation. Its just worse than the problem.
> Five seconds looking at the GlobalWitness.org website reveals them to be far left political activists.
Environmentalists, which is a different kettle of fish (if you're American both leftwing politics and, albeit to a much lesser extent, environmentalism will be foreign to you).
However, that's neither here nor there. Facebook should not be publishing threats.
They are activists, certainly. Why does that mean you can just ignore them?
If you were on a jury, and a witness said they'd seen the suspect washing blood off a tire iron, would you ignore them because they looked and talked like a liberal?
This is the same thing. GW says it did this experiment and got these results. Ad-homineming GW does nothing to address their findings.
"Five seconds looking at the GlobalWitness.org website reveals them to be far left political activists."
Combining ad-hominem with straw man. Deft work. What difference does that make, when they've exposed the fact that Facebook will take money to run death threat ads? You really think that's a FoS issue?
Biden exaggerated but you deliberately miss the context and you lie.
He did say those words but he also said, at exactly the same time "Ten thousand people have recently died; 9,950 of them, thereabouts, are people who hadn't been vaccinated." He deliberately stated that it wasn't 100% effective and that 50 of those 10,000 had been vaccinated.
American based companies treating the rest of the world the same as America?
My, what wishful thinking that is, most US companies can't even get it in their heads that 95% of the world's population do not use their messed up date format and have the decency to put the month as word rather numbers. But we (RoW) are not important to US based companies, we are there just cash cows to them as we have no bite, not even the EU could get Mark Z over to explain stuff, the UK would have no hope of imposing anything on the likes of FB, Google or MS.
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