Don't care for the guy but I believe bad people should be allowed to make money. I have an issue with advertisers bullying platforms to remove bad guys, but that's the way it works.
It's reasonable for advertisers to care about where their ads appear and what content they're associated with. It's been part of placement strategy for as long as modern advertising has existed. Magazines/broadcasts/websites naturally need to be sensitive to that because advertisers are ultimately their clients.
It's far less reasonable for governments to use their authority to intervene between those parties, at least without clear legal justification and prior exercise of due process.
> It's reasonable for advertisers to care about where their ads appear and what content they're associated with.
It's reasonable for them to care, but it's less reasonable that anyone else care about their concerns.
Advertisers are the clients, but they also need something to attract our eyeballs before they can hijack our attention with their shitty ads. Media is a lot more consolidated than the ad industry and they have a strong enough position to push back. All media has to say is "if you pull your ads we'll never run another ad for your product in any of our magazines/broadcasts/websites again"
There's zero reason why anyone should assume that just because an ad is shown in a magazine it indicates total approval of the full contents of that magazine anyway.
I don't associate companies with whatever random things their ads appear next to, I don't even remember it. I'm pretty sure this is also true for 99.9% of other people. This brand safety stuff is just an excuse for woke marketing staffers to feel like they're "making a difference" by attacking people and companies they don't like.
> This brand safety stuff is just an excuse for woke marketing staffers to feel like they're "making a difference"
The incentive structures are clear: you do nothing and maybe get fired if your company gets embroiled in a controversy due to the placement of those ads, or you pull your ads and spend that budget in another channel, and worse case nothing will happen to you, and best case you'll be praised for proactive thinking. Woke or not, I'd imagine most people would choose the latter; the former is mostly downside with limited upside.
Marketers/advertisers have clearly felt different about this forever. There's really no doubt that advertisers leaned on newspapers to have certain stories "above the fold" or to not carry or diminish other stories.
I'd say that advertisers are in a good place to know whether people do or don't notice what ads are next to content, or vice versa.
I do notice ads and assume some minimal endorsement of content by the advertisers - we are constantly assured that Internet ads are at least demographically targeted.
> I don't associate companies w with whatever random things their ads appear next to, I don't even remember it.
Of course you don't. You're watching things you're comfortable with and so you have no complaint about an advertiser's association with it.
> I'm pretty sure this is also true for 99.9% of other people. This brand safety stuff is just an excuse for woke marketing staffers to feel like they're "making a difference" by attacking people and companies they don't like.
Holding advertisers accountable for their placement, and distributors accountable for their catalog, predates "woke culture" by well over a century. Most "woke culture" activists in the US grew up seeing it aggressively deployed by "family oriented" activist groups in 1970's - 2000's era and they saw it be extremely effective at influencing what was available on TV, in print, in cinemas, and on music shelves because it threatened revenue and scared capitalists. And those "family groups" learned it from the anti-communists of the post-WWII era, etc, etc.
It's not new, it's not "woke", and history suggests that it does have material impact on media, culture, and business.
>I have an issue with advertisers bullying platforms to remove bad guys, but that's the way it works.
Yes, you'd think in 2023, platform companies could just disassociate advertisers with channels rather than just kicking someone off the platform. You don't want your ads on Brand's channel? Just uncheck the "show ads on this channel" box.
I'm fairly certain that's available, but companies want people completely silenced and use their advertising money as leverage to do so, which is significantly more insidious.
> yeah, misleading people on the internet is big business
So what? In America, unless you violate FDA or SEC (or similar) agencies, or are slandering or libelling, its not illegal. Also, who is the arbiter of what is "true" in your comment above? Not everything has a fact based logical answer that is generally accepted. Should pastors be kicked off YT for "misleading" people about heaven? Free speech protects EVERYONE's right to speak because from someone else's point of view, you are the one that is misleading someone.
Also, in terms of Brand, or other cases, an allegation can be settled in many courts. Once adjudicated, it is appropriate to consider action.
I was personally affected and have a very nuanced thoughts about this and policy generally. However, they are not outside the spirit of what I said above? Purdue did run afoul of FDA guidelines. Regardless, US drug policy is very broken.
I'm being flippant but I stand by my point. I think your line of thinking is what leads to things like the DSA in Europe. Laws already exist so when you say "bad people" who are you referring to? People breaking laws but they haven't been charged? Or people you personally are defining as morally bad?
Are you saying YouTube is a public utility like telephones? To me it's an application that could be replaced by another application one day. Not necessarily Rumble but maybe something else.
But if you don't think it's a utility, it would be strange to believe they should be regulated like one.
Land line telephones got replaced by cell phones. That didn't make land lines less of a utility. Anything could be replaced somewhere down the road.
You don't really have a choice with regards to your YouTube usage, currently. There isn't anything near YouTube, and due to it's currently-established presence, we won't realistically see it getting replaced any time soon.
Would you have a problem with "Please watch this ad for samketchup's product before watching this blogger's pro-Hamas video!"? Remember, free speech means the blogger is allowed to say what they say...
Not the GP poster, but I would honestly be okay with that because I actually believe in free speech. As we discovered over the last 2 weeks, though, many colleges (including at least half of the ivy league) are also okay with pro-Hamas rallies -- not because they believe in free speech, but because they've chosen a side.
> As we discovered over the last 2 weeks, though, many colleges (including at least half of the ivy league) are also okay with pro-Hamas rallies -- not because they believe in free speech, but because they've chosen a side.
Were the rallies actually pro-Hamas, or pro-Palestine?
That's a fair question. I'm sure some attendees are pro-Palestine, but many of the important organizers might not be. I've seen a few things over the last 2 weeks that led me to this impression:
* While speaking at an off-campus event, Cornell professor Russell Rickford described the massacre of Israelis as "exhilarating" and "energizing". You can find plenty of citations (including video) by Googling his name; most of them come from right-wing news sources, but unfortunately the liberal newspapers didn't deem this worth mentioning.
* Many examples of the protesters chanting "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". Wikipedia actually has an article about this phrase, which originates from before Gaza and the West Bank were controlled by Israel. In other words, the term "Palestine" referred to something other than West Bank/Gaza when that slogan was originated. In the true meaning of that phrase, "Palestine" refers to the entire region of which modern-day Israel is a subset, and "free" means "no Israel". All of this lines up with the Hamas worldview.
* Black Lives Matter tweeted a picture saying "I stand with Palestine" that had a picture of a man on a paraglider. [1] That's a reference to Hamas terrorists using paragliders to cross checkpoints at the Gaza border, and then murdering innocents (including women, children, and babies). Again, the words-as-written on that tweet just reference "Palestine" while the picture makes it perfectly clear who they really stand with. Also, I'm sorry for citing exclusively right-wing sources. I swear this really happened, and is being reported correctly here; it's just that liberal sources won't cover it.
You could kind of excuse American protesters for #2. I like to think that most Americans who sympathize with Palestine do so on the basic grounds of "everyone is entitled to personal freedom, dignity, and a place to call home." It all gets muddy when you understand the history and how they got here, but who in America really knows hardly any of that (even recent events)?
#1 and #3 are just bizarre. You have to have a seriously fucked-up world view to excuse what Hamas did on Saturday, regardless of anything and everything Israel did prior to that.
Well, it was poor choice of words since you can't expect mobs with pitchforks to understand nuance, but if I can interpret his words favorabily to him, the exhiliration is not because some Israeli grandmas and babies were being butchered, but because; imagine a dog that's been kept in a small cage and abused for many years, wouldn't you expect it to hate its owner, and wouldn't you expect it to bite the owner, if given the chance; well, finally it's gotten a chance.
To expand on "poor choice of words"/"nuance", yeah ok, I agree with you to a degree, being exhilirated rather than horrified does seem to me he's taking the deaths for granted. Here's your whataboutism: it seems some of the "Hate Israel" camp take the Israeli deaths for granted, just like some of the "Hate Hamas" camp take the Palestinian deaths for granted and justify these with "Well, what can you do if Hamas hides among civilians?"/"It's Hamas' fault anyway, not IDFs!" and deaths painful to family and friends are just summarized as "collateral damage".
It's far less reasonable for governments to use their authority to intervene between those parties, at least without clear legal justification and prior exercise of due process.