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fooker 6 hours ago

What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial?

If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.

In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.

I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.

phire 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.

Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.

Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.

raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, a user in GA should be shown an ad for a car dealership in Hawaii…

HWR_14 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Geofenced ads are not the same as targeted ads.

raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay what if I am in Florida and Facebook sees that all of my posts are in Spanish, should it not be allowed to target me with Spanish speaking ads?

arter45 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If the ads content depends on a social media company seeing your posts and analyzing them, it’s probably fair to say it’s targeted advertising.

Browsers typically send Accept-Language headers so you could easily return ads in languages matching that header, without having to analyze your posts.

It’s like switching on to a Spanish TV channel and getting Spanish speaking ads. It’s not targeted because you are signalling you probably understand Spanish.

dahart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correct. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.

phire 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Such a law will probably allow targeting based on the browser's language (browsers already send a "Accept-Language" field, doxing you with every single http request), or whatever language you have configured a website/app interface to be shown in.

But not guess a language based on the content of posts.

raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But I don’t speak Spanish and I’m in Florida…

terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How will they know where their target audience goes if there is no tracking?

kaibee 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Use 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.

fooker 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good policy in my opinion.

NeutralCrane 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.

terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Subscription based services have exactly the same incentive to increase engagement.

AmbroseBierce 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.

fooker 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally.

Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.

intended 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /

You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.

Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.