I wish they'd stop serving scams too. I keep seeing shit like "make 75,000 using Ethereum and ChatGPT"
Scams in online advertising are ubiquitous, I'm amazed adtech companies don't seem to see any consequences for it. I really think there needs to be an onus on online advertisers to prove that the products and services they promote are not scams before anything gets exposed to the public.
I see adblockers as essential security tools at this point, however you dress it up one of the main functions of adtech in the present seems to be connecting literal conmen with their marks as efficiently as possible.
Well, this also needs to be on website publishers who use ads from vendors that don't guarantee that the ads are not scams. Bad ads on any site should have equal treatment to bad content, and should be considered as published by that site (not by the actual ad vendor, i.e., no way to shift responsibility, only to share).
That is, what we need is a rule: N scam ad impressions on my blog (even if they come from a third-party ad provider) = knock-knock from the police at my door as if I were writing scammy blog articles.
How would you police what is a scam vs not practically? In the wrong hands, a malicious actor could forward a narrative
Curious to think that the billion dollar profits, and 6-figure salaries, are earned by scamming people out of their money. Via an intermediary which is the scammer paying for ads on your platform, the money they have through by scamming people in the first place.
Yeah I suppose that's a certain %, the rest of it is ads from e.g. booking.com if you google "hotel california", and other not-really-scam companies. But a pie chart of "Profits made from ads from legitimate company" vs "Scammy ads" would be interesting.
And "a propos of nothing, would you like to see this political fringe/crank/"angle"/plain lies content?"
Since YouTube started to take disabled tracking seriously, I guess I see what it tends to suggest to Joe Shmoe, and it's not good - not for Joe and for sure not for social cohesion.
I was sure there was EU laws as well as big tech policies against misinformation / fake news nowadays, maybe I was wrong, maybe there's no oversight, or maybe money trumps principles/laws. I'm disappointed, given that it's no secret that foreign interests (e.g. Russia) are funding / pushing these divisive misinformation campaigns.
Ironically, me saying it's Russia pushing divisive campaigns is in itself a divisive statement to make, therefore, mission successful?
I'm also fairly surprised that such crap is still happening. I think I remember details about one time that it happened, it was in the context of a video where some US dude tries all kinds of flammable liquids as fuel in a combustion engine. It was like YouTube decided "Oh, redneck content! That guy is gonna love himself some right-wing cringe shit."
No, YouTube. That guy doesn't like it and that guy doesn't like YouTube serving divisive garbage to others.
It might not be a scam, maybe the rest of the sentence is "...by spending 150,000"
Worst...Do a search for Paris Airport Charles de Gaulle main website.
Watch in horror how in 2024, with all their AI and Algorithmic gurus, Google will serve you as top answers series and series of cloned sites. Sites run from multiple remote countries, that are literally visual replicas of the airport main website and clearly trying to impersonate the main website.
For those interested, this might be related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
> I wish they'd stop serving scams too. I keep seeing shit like "make 75,000 using Ethereum and ChatGPT"
I love those scam ads. They're so entertaining. I actually try to download my favorites sometimes.
My current YouTube is full of self help gurus, ads for funeral insurance, tampons and ground to air anti aircraft missile systems.
You must have a very interesting watch history
I think it's more like my google profile is completely hosed lol.
I've reported deepfake scam ads of famous people for months and Google does nothing. It's also not uncommon to see adwords links to phishing sites pretending to be banks above the legitimate bank link, and those ads seem to stay up indefinitely. Very disappointing to see they choose money over ethics.
and the Lumiheat!
YouTube creators are going to be upset by this, political ads in election years have a CPM of upwards of $5. It makes up a lot of their income.
Sure, but feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests is worse than creators making a bit less.
Like the sibling commenter, I don't get it. If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? And if someone puts a filter on the garbage that reaches impressionable people, then, being so impressionable, won't they be influenced by whoever controls the filter?
It is more to limit a foreign entity's grasp on controlling the mindset of their citizens. You can compare the feeds of teens in China vs the US on TikTok
I hear this concern a lot; but never could quite grasp it.
If the premise is that the mindset of citizens is so easily controllable that a foreign entity can do it, then why is a foreign entity's control of citizens' mindset any worse than domestic entity's control of the same? If people have no protection against the control of their mindset, then does it not follow that their minds will be controlled by _some_ entity? Isn't the game already lost at that point? And are we really discussing whom we would rather surrender our minds to?
I don’t think it’s a more complex subject than “these people are ours to control, not yours”.
Yes, I agree.
But in a presumably democratic society, I would have thought, people would need convincing to submit to this claim.
> what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny.
> If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
> The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Yes.
What is the instrument for measuring societal good? And what is the mechanism for acting upon those measurements? My naive understanding is that in a society that purports to be democratic, societal good is expressed through votes (people vote for things they deem to be good, or for people who promise to bring those things about), and the enactment of those measurements is done through the same mechanism.
> Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes. Now we need a mechanism that establishes the goodness of faith of the informer. And if the past five or so years have taught me anything it is that barely anyone who plays professional-league politics speaks in good faith.
Yeah it seems like just another misguided attempt at fixing some issue by the EU. The principal is nice, but the effects and implementation is garbage.
> Sure, but feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests is worse than creators making a bit less.
If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests.
While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individual voter makes is their completely valid choice.
And honestly, lectures about how XYZ represents the voter's interest and they must vote for that candidate otherwise they're somehow "doing it wrong" is itself a class of "feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests."
Yes, usually you have to vote against some of your own interests because no candidate lines up perfectly with your interests.
When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.
I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.
For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.
I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.
But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.
I think it has more to do with "we should remove the power from this foreign company to have a say in who wins our elections".
True. The whole problem with democracy is that plebs and underclasses are allowed to vote. We should really limit the voting bloc to phd holders in humanities.
That's ridiculous. We also need minimum asset thresholds for at least 3 generations. What good is a PhD in the hands of someone without a pedigree.
Did you forget a "/s" or is that your genuine belief / political stance?
That is the fun part - you have to decide yourself.
I don’t think this is the right website for that sort of rhetoric.
Do you have any sincere beliefs that you’d like to earnestly discuss with other people with curiosity?
The rhetoric is indeed the only difference. The same level of insanity, coded differently, makes up a good chunk of non-technical HN.
A particle or a wave. Choose one. Cannot be both. It's travesty against nature.
Is a belief that universal franchise is stupid, but since we are playing that stupid game we should enjoy it's stupid prizes and not cry disinformation every time the voters have the audacity to vote against the preferences of the pseudo intellectual elite that controversial?
Some phds are also impressionable; some of them are even religious, so then I think we should just not vote at all and decide randomly. Will it make much difference?
/s -- why is this a thing now?
Designing a voting system that requires an informed objective voter is hard but not impossible.
It would be fun to run a test system in parallel. Try different thing in different locations with each election. (results discarded)
Say, if you want a person to go places and do several things. Surely if you don't pay them for the work you don't get to complaint about quality?
Voting for issues as well or in stead of candidates seems needed. We now have a process to hire an employee. Letting the new hire (temp) figure out how to is pretty silly. They should know what we want. (and get fired if they refuse) Adjusting salary to performance (by popular vote) also seems good.
Lots of bad ideas we can try without doing much harm.
edit:
I forgot, as developers we should attempt to solve the puzzle in code. Voting on things is not new terrain but there remains lots to explore.
It is incompatible with universal franchise because some people jusy don't want to be that kind of viter. And if we are not doing universal franchise let's just go full starship troopers.
The fun of democracy is that some people will just have to suck it up. Not everyone needs to approve of elections by the proverbial battle royal to the death.
I wrote this software I call subjective sort. The algo is this: Everyone gets to chose from just 2 options but they are chosen randomly. So you would get a ballot with Jill Stein and Afroman on it. We give you some time to read/view some about their election program. You pick one, they get +1 the other -1. If there are enough participants this bubbles the list from best to worse. By comparison well informed choices.
The demo sorts countries by population. I don't even know where some of them are but it works.
https://subjective-sort.go-here.nl
enjoy
Acknowledging the deliberate rampant misinformation campaigns doesn't make you an elitist.
But claiming that people vote against their interests and the assumption that you know better than them what their interests are makes you one.
People do vote against their interests. Full stop. We have agreed there is misinformation. Who is doing it and why? Is it people not in power who have no resources manipulating people in power? Or is it people in power who have the resources manipulating people not in power? The answer is obviously the latter. And if it's people in power doing it, they are doing it for their own good. They are not doing it benevolently.
> People do vote against their interests. Full stop.
If you're not talking about the normal compromises every voter needs to make between competing priorities, then I think you should own your position and advocate that you yourself be given the power to exercise those voters votes on their behalf, since you claim to know what their interests are better than they do.
So do you really think there are no people who have ever voted against their own interests because they were misled, or even lied to?
That doesn’t mean that they should be disenfranchised, but perhaps it’s worth looking into how those people can be better informed, and thus enabled to vote for options that actually align with the outcomes they desire?
Thoughts and prayers.
Great news, if some years too late... The one time I tried to turn off the ad-block on YouTube, I gave up because of political ads. Now I'm not going back for other reasons, too.
Also some tracking parameters were added on the URL. Not sure if it's from Hacker News, or from rejecting cookies, or what.
I wonder if recent propaganda around war is part of this block?
I don’t think so, this is not new.
At least in France there are rules regarding political spending and advertising. The basic idea is that even with an unlimited amount of money, you are not allowed to buy significantly more tv time than your opponents, campaign spending is capped etc. Since 2021 that’s what google does for France : no ads about a debate of general interest three months before an election.
On tv it’s manageable : there are not many channels, and everything is declared, at worse just have a bunch of people watch and report. I understand that google can’t deal with this automatically.
I am not saying it necessarily works well in practice, just that it’s not a new idea.
After living in 2 EU countries and the UK for decades, I don't think I've ever seen a political ad on any Google product (and even overall?).
It's probably a very minor impact to Google's ad bottom line.
Same here. I also wonder who would even target their political ads at european audiences.
EU countries have elections, too.
Not sure about the EU-27, but the UK has rules about election ads, to the extent that Cambridge Analytica was a scandal. Some of that scandal was due to bribery and offering prostitutes, but even the aspects that were purely what is considered "normal" for targeting online advertising was unacceptable by UK political standards.
That said, part of the latter being scandalous assumes that they were actually capable of providing the service they claimed, which is something I find myself increasingly unable to believe due to how wildly badly I get categorised by the main advertising platforms — nationality, country of residence, language, gender, all wrong.
I don't know what various countries' norms are, but if people aren't used to political ads and are generally suspicious of the concept, an ad may have negative utility.
I know if I saw a paid ad for a candidate that would make me want to vote against them.
Paper flyers in your mailbox, and billboards in people's gardens, are some age-old and very common forms of advertisement during elections I've seen in multiple countries in Europe
In Spain we get nicely labeled "Political Propaganda" in the mail around election time. I think by law each party can send you one letter, and it has to have the "Political Propaganda" text on the outside.
It's pretty nice in that I can throw it all straight into the recycling bin!
At least in France I don't think I've seen either of those. More common are poster stuck on public infrastructure
Interesting. Where are billboards on private property common?
I mostly see them on tv, public billboards and light poles.
Here's an example: https://img.nieuwsblad.be/vXdqo10D824EJ6p5Ab4IBfARaZs=/960x6...
Australia small signs (100cmx50cm size) are common. Billboards you’d see down a commercial street are probably private property and often are political also.
What? We mostly get political ads in CEE region as most of the products or services being sold here are not applicable anyway.
exactly.
they already cannot show ads on EU because of regulations... not that they wouldn't, but campaign managers abide to the regulations and don't go to google.
so what google does? spin it as a holier than thou campaign to try to offset the dumpster fire that is the very lucrative US campaign ads they do profit handsomely from.
"look over here, not over there". so boring.
also, their jobs site have tons of lobbyist positions on DC ;)
In a roughly two-week window of not having adblock enabled, I have seen a ton of "politics-adjacent" ads in Germany. They'd usually start off with something that will get right-wing nuts excited ("This Green Party politician ruined their career, learn more.") and will then pivot to some crypto-scam.
I'm wondering if those will be affected by the new ban as well, or if crypto scams aren't political enough to apply.
Closer to an election you will also see ads from actual political parties. I’ve mostly noticed them from CDU and AfD, sometimes the greens.
The european commission and EP are already the top political advertising spender for Facebook in most EU countries.
This will be an unexpected boost to their ad revenue
Less poltical information from fewer sources equals incumbent protection. This is a regression for democracy and an advance for oligarchy.
"Information" is not what's being presented in YouTube ads. And non-incumbents/non-oligarchs can't afford to run those ads anyways.
It costs as little as $10 a day to run ads on YouTube. Getting results realistically requires higher spend, but a few thousand dollars can make a decent impact.
Whereas traditional ad agencies and TV networks require orders of magnitude more spend to get started. Those are the placements you need oligarchs friends for.
Or, you have a sensible system which bans political ads on TV / print / etc, and grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.
We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.
> bans political ads on TV / print / etc,
Power is a zero sum game. Banning adverts and paid media strengthens the influence of organic media like journalists, social media and podcasters.
In the US context, that might've strengthened the Trump campaign's position relative to Harris - given the higher follower counts and podcast views.
> grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.
The UK does something like this with free ad segments on linear TV at election times for major parties. However, the effectiveness has decreased with falling TV viewership.
I wish this comment were true, because this would mean political parties actually use knowledge and information to encourage people to vote for them. In the democratic elections I am exposed to (UK, US), this could not be further from the truth. Further, I think targeted marketing will always lean away from information and into exploiting emotional responses. A reduction in a bombardment of targeted marketing is a positive thing.
However, there should definitely be exemptions, as political information basically just means anything that matters. I feel that ads must have a clear intention to inform, not sell, when it comes to politics.
Well, it's true that political parties/candidates don't tell the truth about themselves but they often point true things about their political opponents. I think it's better if someone is allowed to pay for an ad pointing out someone's voting record, their past, their connections. Bringing attention to something has value as people can then verify the claim if they wish.
Interesting, why do you think so?
I feel like paid, targeted ads on platforms everyone uses are extremely insidous, because an incumbent or major political party will always have more funds than an e.g. an upstart party, and targeting is generally bad as it's easy to play into people's preconceived notions that way, instead of presenting your position or the change you advocate for.
Edit: replaced "incumbent" with "incumebt or major political party"
Winning at targeted ads is more of a skill game.
You typically only need a few thousand well placed votes to win an election, and even 100k impressions at $10 CPM is pretty inexpensive.
> You typically only need a few thousand well placed votes to win an election, and even 100k impressions at $10 CPM is pretty inexpensive.
In the context of the EU this isn't true though, no political system in any EU member state relies on a tiny minority of votes from some states/provinces to completely tip an election.
There are still some discontinuities in the electoral systems where smallish number of votes can have a massive impact.
For example the run off thresholds in French legislative elections. And some places like Italy still use FPTP in a hybrid form.
However you're correct that there's nothing quite like Pennsylvania in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_electi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Italian_general_election#...
There is diminishing returns once you have enough money to spread your message. The problems arise when you don't have a way to spread it at all. It's not always a better funded who wins anyway. The last US election are the prime example: Democrats significantly outspent Trump and lost. I am sure every American have heard both sides as well: their message and their attacks on their opponent. I think more information is better for democracy in general. Removing political ads cuts in in favor of incumbents, who in EU often control other (than the Internet) media.
Can't uploaders still post political videos?
Based on the political ads I've seen over the years, people are better off hearing from non-paid sources.
Oligarchy actually does great with less regulation too.
How does this advance an oligarchy?
I don't know, watching how USA's elections unfold with ads I don't see much real information, it's a whole lot of noise with ads not beholden to any kind of truth. One can claim anything in those ads, attack politicians not even based on what they say or what their platform states as far as it's not clear cut libel and/or defamation, plaster some fearmongering and lies on an ad and run with it to damage opponents.
The less noise there's for this kind of bullshit, the better. I'm really happy that every place I've lived so far doesn't have more sources of noise during elections.
How are you going to learn about the people running then? Rely on what they say? You need some mechanism so others can criticize them and be heard.
Of course I need mechanisms to hear criticisms, political ads like the ones in the USA are definitely not that, that's what I said.
I learn about the people running from different sources, journalism where I live still has some modicum of journalism and not entertainment news like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. even though they have clear biases it's quite well understood where their biases sit at, and even the most biased publications here are not overtly partisan so even when they don't align with my political views it's still interesting to read and consider the whole spectrum of opinions without those clearly pushing a distorted reality.
I really do not understand how ads are even considered as any part of the solution, at all. I'm not attacking what you said but just want to clarify it's a very alien view to my own, ads are inherently untrustworthy, they are paid, they don't suffer public scrutiny.
I rely much more on interviews of candidates, publications pro and against them (including the ones I align with that's how I decided to not vote for a candidate and pushing for another candidate of the same party a couple elections ago), and read through their policies in their official platforms.
> Meta cuts the price of its ad-free plan by 40 percent in a bid to sate EU regulators
(the second article bundled with the first article, at least for me)
I'm sooooo feed up with platforms and news sites/papers knowingly starkly misrepresent the relationship of ADs and GDPR to mislead consumers and enforcement just accepting it.
I.e. they represent it as if the choice is "no-pay+ad+tracking" or "pay+no-ad+no-tracking" but that is _not_ what GDPR is about.
It's only about tracking and requires not tracking to be as easy as with tracking i.e. "no-pay+ad+tracking" vs. "no-pay+ad+no-tracking". If you want to also have a payed no-ad plan, sure go ahead, but that isn't required by GDPR nor is it _fulfilling the requirements GDPR it gives you_.
But most especially news sides require you to pay to not be spied on and also happen to then no longer show ads, which really isn't what GDPR is meant to enforce, privacy is recognized by the EU as a fundamental human right, not a luxury good you need to pay for.
It is a remarkably complex issue to take a stance on, because most voters don't seem to do any particular research, don't have any understanding of cause-and-effect between policies and outcomes and are easily swayed by lies. Does allowing ad spending on Google push that messy equilibrium towards a better result or a worse result? I contend it is impossible to say with certainty but political ads are likely a net win for voters. They're going to be misinformed by political ads, but also by silence. At least with paid candidate messages they know what the candidates think is popular.
But this is a good outcome for the EU nonetheless because Google is a US company and the EU is based in Europe [0]. EU and US interests don't always align, examples like Nord Stream stick out. Or the trade and tariff battles. Putting US companies in charge of EU political communication seems like insanity.
[0] My alter ego is Captain Obvious
The problem is not so much paid political ads as imbalance in spending and tracking the real person behind the ad ? ( which is what you’re pointing at I think )
Article says this has been done other places already. Has this specifically been campaign ads or does it also involve things that are considered politically motivated messaging? For example, is there danger of vaccination PSAs getting banned because some politicians say bizarre things about them?
I would hope so. The government paying private companies to spread its propaganda is bad for many reasons.
It's already an uphill battle to fix misinformation concerning vaccines without calling it political.
“Hey guys, I’d like to go ahead and give a big shout out to todays sponsor…”
Plotting where the line falls is an interesting problem. Is anti-vaccine misinformation political? Is it greenwashing oil political? Attacking EV incentives? Is correctly informing people about climate change political?
Climate change shouldn't be but is, but hey, there's a great joke about video games only have 2 gender options now: Male and political.
Considering how much of YouTube's "content" is right wing conspiracy nonsense, can't see how this is going to move the needle much.
I genuinely don't see any. What are you doing to get the algorithm to feed you content like that?
Or if this isn't in your feed - what are you basing your estimate on?
I don't doubt there's a ton of it - but I'm curious how you know there's a ton of it.
Fair question! So, I don't have a "feed" as I have all of YouTube's tracking either switched off or blocked via NextDNS and I try to only use it signed out. The rare occasions that I have to use YouTube, the right hand sidebar is regularly filled with completely insane stuff. Though sometimes it's just filled with thumbnails of people pulling stupid faces while pointing at something.
It doesn't take much. We recently had large floods where I live and I decided that for next time I was going to have some supplies ready, just in case. A few seemingly benign searches for "preparedness" later and my feed is full of conspiracy theorists, guns and Jeeps. I guess the "prepper" crowd correlates strongly with some other categories.
The fact you have to go out of your way to find this supposed "right wing conspiracy nonsense" should be a good indicator of your own bias.
I wonder if you had the same opinion of being prepared with cars and guns if you lived in ukraine or gaza
He didn't go out of his way, he literally just explained that he searched for something and got served the crackpot stuff. Searching for something on YouTube isn't going "out of your way", it's using it as intended. Maybe read it again.
He searched for "preparedness" it's like complaining you get security related videos when searching for VPNs
No, no it isn't.
If security and independence isn't part of your "preparedness" maybe check your privilege :)
