This reads like a tragic story. Once you've collected enough data on every internet user out there to group them into different advertising cohorts, the remaining ungrouped users, by process of elimination (due to privacy or targeted advertising laws), are children; and now they can be targeted just as easily.
"We're sorry."
This is not surprising. Google has a history violating the privacy of and targetting ads to not only teenagers, but children:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/youtube-ads-kids...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/media/youtube-ki...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/business/media/google-you...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/google-youtube...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/technology/youtube-google...
When will governments wake up and put a stop to this? Their inaction is simply a sign of complicity. Absolutely disgraceful and criminal behavior.
Everyone working at these companies: you're partly to blame, whether you're directly involved or not. Reconsider the behavior you're supporting, and quit.
Not allowing advertising to children I think isn't the correct route for society.
Instead we should prevent children having money. Until you're 16, you may not handle money. You may not buy things for money. You may not sell things. You may not enter into contracts to exchange money.
Your parents however can do all of those things on your behalf.
At that point, advertising to children no longer is relevant - the children cannot buy the advertised things.
Having ads targeted at children can be seen as a good thing: it trains the children in what advertising is like, about how they can be manipulated and exploited. It's good for them to get this experience while young when the stakes are low.
Of course, this might also train children to be the exploiters and manipulators. Maybe their parents would think that's a good thing too, at least in the long run.
Wouldn't it be better to remove exploitation and manipulation than to subject children to it in the hopes that it somehow makes them resistant to more of it later?
I don't see how that would work.
If the reason that you think it's good to allow advertising to children, despite it being bad in and of itself, is that it prepares them to be subjected to ads as an adult, wouldn't it be better to instead remove the ads for adults as well?
Ads serve a useful function, particularly if one can filter out deception.
Personally, I plan to prepare my kids by keeping them away from as many sources of advertising as possible and teaching them how to do the same when they're older. e.g. they're completely unaware of the existence of anything Disney-related.
It is already the case, more or less. Parents manage their children assets, including money, and children abilities to enter into contract is very limited. They can manipulate money, but only if they parents let them, and they usually do, because it would be crazy not to.
It changes nothing to the situation with ads. Ads for children actually target the parents, manipulating children so that they can in turn manipulate their parents. It can be terrible, for example by advertising for something fashionable to wear at school, too expensive for the child allowance, they expect their parents to buy it, because if they don't their kids may get bullied. Not giving children access to money won't solve this problem, quite the opposite actually, if it was their money, they could realize how overpriced the thing is and how much they could do by spending it elsewhere.
I remember when I was a kid (a long time ago now...), Dr. Martens shoes were the fashion, that my school forbade them. We had uniforms, but the rule with shoes was just that they had to be black. I think the ban was on the technicality that the stiching was yellow, so they're not black shoes. And a student tried to loophole the loophole by coloring the yellow stitching black.
I wonder if some brands give out free stuff to "child influencers" so other kids would moan to their parents about buying the items...
They are called brand ambassadors and they go back to to before Internet.
The best looking person at your college didn't pay for their iBook.
I wonder if some brands give out free stuff to "child influencers" so other kids would moan to their parents about buying the items...
See Ryan's World on Youtube for example, it's a huge industry.
Yep, drawing red lines around age of consent has worked so well in the past, I think this is the way.
I'm so glad we have simple and effective solutions like this. Otherwise can you imagine the kinds of problems we'd have with kids vaping, buying lootboxes and scrolling social media designed to hijack their not-yet-fully-developed-brains?
... And by "age of consent" I meant "minimum legal age recognized to make decisions pertaining to topic X". Is there a proper term for that, so I don't sound so stupid in future?
You perhaps want the term "age of majority".
I think this is exactly the opposite of how it should be. Teach children to engage in trade and sensible use of money and currency early, but shield them from the immense leverage that corporate advertising has on the developing mind. I want well rounded children who are good independent critical thinkers, not brain-hijacked and inept with money.
Speaking of the corporate advertising, I just saw an ad today that basically grooms kids into credit card concept. This bank has a prepaid card and app that's being managed by parents.
The ad story is "charming": busy parents forgot to pack his son properly for a summer camp, so he calls them and says he misses item x that is crucial. So they both leave their jobs and in a rush through city they're trying to save their boy. While he just orders stuff online with a help of a card, app and smartphone. And with "plastic money" little guy saves the day on his own.
Sure, its 21st century, we're living in the 20s and you can't avoid technology in banking, finances and pocket money for your kids but this barely teaches any responsibility - that ad deep between the lines sells the idea that money are magically "there". Just go for the limit, next month daddy and mommy will charge the card again.
I have seen an ad for that, and I felt mixed about it. I think such a "children's learning" type card which actually allows real purchases is a good idea for financial responsibility, but you'd have to be really cognisant of perverse incentives set up by a financial institution that can profit in this space.
Ah yes, don’t give children _any_ responsibility with money until they are 16, and then just throw them into cold water and expect them to know how to manage spending.. Sorry for being sarcastic here, and I know how to raise children is a divisive topic, but this sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Let’s give children responsibility and agency as early as possible, so they can learn to make decisions.
But e.g. getting children hooked on instagram will pay off later.
Ah yes, why let children learn about money and responsibility, much better to treat them like pets so that advertising scumbags don't have a reason to target them.
The mental gymnastics people will do to avoid having to admit that daddy Google is a creepy advertising company never ceases to astound me.
I guess you don't have children.
You can still get brainwashed by ads without spending a cent
There are so many things wrong with your post!! In your spirit, we should be able to sell heroin to kids, just not give them money, only the first free dose (that's that all the blinking and sounds on the ads do to their brains). I had a colleague once that said exactly that (and he effing meant it) "if selling heroin to kids was legal, I would be outside a school right now - it's their parents' problem" (yes he has kids)(at the time he was a IT contractor making GBP 1200 per day - and that was 8 years ago)(there are scum and scum.. and then there was him).
Anyway.. we (should) protect kids as much as possible from as many possible risks and threats (old and new).
(also, go see a therapist, you need help)
Everyone working at these companies: you're partly to blame, whether you're directly involved or not. Reconsider the behavior you're supporting, and quit.
I used to think like this, until I got married and started a family.
I’m no longer so quick to judge folks for not doing what I believe to be the most ideal (or even ethical) thing in these types of circumstances.
For many of us who have families, our top priority is making sure we can continue to take care of our households and not risking that in any way unless absolutely necessary.
There are tons of tech jobs out there. That excuse doesn't work so well when you're in one of the most lucrative careers there is. Creating a dystopia where everyone is spied upon 24/7 is also not something someone with kids should want to do.
There _were_ tons of tech jobs.
Much harder to jump ship nowadays since layoffs have flood the market with high skilled job seekers and borrowing money is no longer free for tech firms.
Life is complicated, employees can be just as much locked in to their jobs at Google as most people are to their products.
There are still tons of jobs. They might not pay as well, but "I need to provide for my kids" might mean you take a crappy IT job that pays 60k, not that you build global surveillance/propaganda systems to be used against them and their peers. This isn't the depression.
And up until recently, there were tons of really good jobs. What's the excuse there?
If you have kids, you're presumably a few years into your career. Do you not have savings? My oldest is 3 and I wouldn't really have to start worrying for years if I lost my job.
Forgetting about pay, are those jobs intellectually stimulating? Do straight conventional E commerce compared to testing infrastructure for video conferencing software? A lot of the appeal of a FAANG is the interesting work you can do at one. The only thing better would be a less secure startup working on something really novel.
So now instead of "I need to do it for my family to survive", it's "I enjoy building panopticons"?
hmmm, hopefully you can find a job that does both? Feed the family and is something that is fun to do.
If you are a social justice warrior, you might prioritize that instead. To each their own.
I enjoy building panopticons
hopefully you can find a job that does both?
Hopefully we quit building panopticons?
testing infrastructure for video conferencing software
There's lots of companies out there that aren't Meta/Alphabet/etc. that also do things like video conferencing software if that's your jam. Smaller companies like BigBlueButton, Whereby, and ClickMeeting; more mid-sized ones like and Zoho Meeting, and the larger players like Webex and GoToMeeting and what not. And this isn't an exhaustive list of non-FAANG video conferencing systems.
Its not like the only "tech" (software?) jobs out there are small mom and pop e-commerce sites or FAANG companies.
Exactly. I was about to respond with something similar, but you did it for me!
Not only are folks getting laid off left and right, salaries have gone down significantly and it’s very difficult to secure a new job in this market (no matter your skills, experience, etc.).
This is also true of people with chronic medical conditions or disabilities. I don’t know if the next company’s insurance will cover my doctors or my medication.
Getting a job while having an obvious disability puts you at a disadvantage, regardless of discrimination being illegal.
That's why we need regulations. Against people actually to blame, but also against ourselves. Basically, just so that being unethical isn't profitable for anyone.
Are commercials during saturday morning cartoons not ads targeted at children?
When I was growing up at least, it was all for candy, toys, and sugary cereal, and often had kids or cartoon characters featured in the commercial.
There's a difference between placing a sports shoes ad in front of a gym, and getting to know the history and habits of every person that ever entered that gym, and showing each a different ad.
I mean, 30 years ago, we were horrified by the extent to which Stasi spied on their own people. Now, we'd call them amateurs.
People were horrified because of what they did with the data. This is why it is different when there is a person listening, as their interests get involved. If it is just something telling me the shoes I looked at last week are on discount, instead of some random ad, who cares?
I used to get a long distance phone bill in the mail with the list of every number I called so I could verify the charges. Was it wrong for MCI to have this data?
Of course, Google would never give this data to a government that engages in targeted killing, Meta would never help out a junta repress their population, etc.
The extent of the data collected and systemic consolidation between different sources is the problem, because we've seen again and again any data collection is dangerous regardless of the original intent.
MCI retaining your phone call records for billing purposes has a legitimate use: they need to be able to justify charging you.
Where it gets controversial is retention time and reuse: ten years from now, there’s no billing justification but you might not want President Donner to demand they turn over the list of everyone who called a political rival. Similarly, you might not care if they have that data but still object to them sharing it with marketing partners (they called LL Bean, you can advertise your outdoors wear to them!) or making it available to other companies who can use it to look up your interests when you are on the phone or applying to something. This can be deeply personal: your car insurance company would definitely pay to know who calls alcohol addiction treatment numbers, an employer of a certain vein might be interested in calls to adult services, etc. Once that data is out, there’s no way to un-breach it.
it's a matter of threshold. There's a point up to which targeted advertising doesn't cause harm, after that, it does. Ads on smartphones cross that threshold. Doesn't matter if TV also does: if it does, it should be limited too, otherwise, it doesn't matter.
Why smartphones and related software cross that threshold? They're specifically designed to increase use time, i.e. to be addictive. It's a drug.
What are the thresholds for tv and the web? Does FCC have any specific guidelines? How about other countries?
The fact that companies making sugary cereals haven't gone out of business and the current obesity crisis suggest to me that those TV commercials are also quite harmful. Something causes people to switch off their brains and feed their kids cookies and marshmallows for breakfast as long as the TV says it's okay and normal.
Absolutely, pretending like this is some Google/Meta only thing.
Newspapers filled their for kids sections with advertising targeted at children. Comic books featured scammy ads targeted at kids.
Some of the most popular nostalgic shows were outright blatant toy advertisements (see: Transformers). This is absolutely not a new problem and its sad to see it hasn't really been addressed.
Yes those are also bad and should not be allowed.
In case anyone replies with "well all companies are bad in some way"... scale is also a factor here. Even if Google does the same things as a small family owned business, they have significantly greater ability to inflict harm.
And I'm not sure I buy that all companies are bad. A lot of companies are earnest and customer-focused when they're smaller and desperate for more users. And I've worked at many companies which were bumbling but not really manipulative or malicious.
In case anyone replies with "well all companies are bad in some way"... scale is also a factor here.
Even disregarding scale, plenty of large companies providing critical service struggle to find good people to do their job.
Sure, they don't pay as well. But if the rebuttal is that you can't find a honest company that pays equivalent salaries, maybe we should call that wage-gap corruption money.
remind me, why was "do no evil" scrubbed from the mission statement?
There's always going to be a lot of money/profit in amoral behavior that's legal -- while being moral means passing on that behavior and money. It's possible to run a business morally and successfully, but rarely as successfully as someone who runs one amorally.
IME, most people in the US will happily take a job with the extra money at an amoral company, even if the lesser paying job at a moral company would still be enough for a comfortable life. (Folks in the US are very price conscious; I don't know how that compares to other cultures/ societies.)
It's like saying all gov are bad in some way. But Spain gov and North Korea gov are definitely not bad in the same way.
Why are you quoting "We're sorry."? Who apologized?
"I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything." is not "I'm sorry."
I honestly don't think our current "implementation" of government has the required momentum to do anything to stop this or enable the will of the people to be enacted on such large corporations. Our government is a highly-reactive machine that's no longer driven by humans, but rather the internal algorithms and processes (bureaucracy).
Just look at the sheer number of "congressional" and "senate" hearings we've seen into everything from AI, to border crossings, to privacy breaches, to antisemitism in universities, to data breaches, etc. Pretty much 0 effect happens anywhere in response, despite us all (including the media) seeing the internals and the problems. You would think some of these problems are pretty easy to solve or at least get consensus on, but you'd be wrong. We've co-evolved our public discourse and media with government such that nothing can happen. If I wasn't so anti-left, I'd say the amount of partisanship in existence is precisely because it disarms us against this government automaton.
Isn't putting ads on children's programming, as has been done since the dawn of television, "targeting children"? This seems like bullshit targeting of the competition to me.
So this was about ads for Instagram on YouTube, targeting people under 18?
I am surprised that this is something that has to be kept secret. What is the main problem with it?
Aside replying to the eroteme:
I believe one can observe the targeting by only observing the children. I ALSO believe this applies to all children in a social network where X between 1 out of 100 000 & 9 out of 10 have access to sites that are the works of the corporate.
The entirely new mechanics seems to be that most humans' will run on metaphorical stimulants & steroids on the metaphorical Wheel of Status. Humane behaviour (e.g. honor, respect, sincere curiosity) will become subject of learned helplessness. Before the child realizes that their toys are not the real things and the real things may be much more interesting; or before the child realizes they don't need to use the toys to satisfy X desires, they will have learned that status, EG pretty videos of using the toys, gets them what they want EG toys & attention from companies, parents & peers alike.
I'd be very grateful if you could elaborate or link to a relevant source as this is rather interesting.
Second this! Quite interesting. @Xen9 please follow up!
My mind would be the source. This is actually one of my least confident comments; I was almost not going to post it. I consider putting a text together later.
Regardless—I've observed, to one example, a young girl I know wanting to buy horse toys to make YouTube horse videos with play & interest in horses being a side motive. The adults are proud of her basically being an instrument of marketing. On one hand, making your own video's at young age is of course something to be proud of and encouragement for children sounds healthy.
Yet this behaviour also has no principles outside "status games." Even knowing that girls of young age are particularly prone to socialization & conformity, one can compare this to "cool new toy everyone has" trope to notice that this dark evolution would be closer to "being a popular advertisement like everyone else" which partly the South Park movie Cred portrays aptly.
In the same vine, people "doing it for the 'Gram": you go to a fancy vacation or restaurant not to enjoy the experience, but to enjoy the validation from the thumbs up, hearts, comments of your friends social media...
I wonder if that's a valid craving after all, a craving for social contact, sadly a craving being answered not by real life interaction, but by a mobile client hitting some API endpoint called something like /post/{$ID}/reaction/heart , ending on your phone pinging with the notification "$friend liked your post"...
but to enjoy the validation
Absolutely. It makes me think about the things in life that don't need "validation".
Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there". It draws a circle around a personal or group experience that explicitly does not or cannot be shared. I think maybe it somehow earns more respect and interest than a photo, and I think with ubiquitous AI image manipulation the currency of "pics or it didn't happen" and "for the Gram" is going to vanish in a puff of incredulity. Now you can just text-prompt for a picture of you and some celebrity you "randomly met" in front of Buckingham Palace or the Taj Mahal! You can probably rent some bots to "auto-like" you on social media, right? So who is fooling who now?
Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there".
sounds like a partial retroactive justification to me. sure, you wouldn't get the full experience via a photo or verbal anecdote, but it's not like camera smartphones were ubiquitous in the 80s either.
It's always so easy to spot these people at restaurants.
Re: confidence
My mind would be the source.
In the coming flood of AI slop and faked "scientific" studies I'd say there is no better source. Real science always starts with anecdata of n=1, so trust what you see. And I'll just add; regardless of the truth of your observation, regardless of any supporting work, these kind of observations are worthwhile as discussion in themselves so do investigate more and write about it, please.
FWIW my interest was piqued by your claim that "learned helplessness" eclipses humane interpersonal behaviours.
That sounds hard to evaluate, especially in children, but I think you may be on to something and that ubiquitous AV technology is the cause of a reward "short circuit". Once kids get AI servants that simulate their achievements for them I think child mental health will implode. (which of course is Jonathan Haidt's thesis)
I noticed many years ago, if someone is 25 then, they'd have grown up with social media, and its trappings of social validation through likes and comments. Facebook was opened to everyone from 13 years old in 2006. Instagram went big in 2012. If you were a teen in late 00's/early 10's, you were probably on these networks, and didn't experience any time growing up without them...
The main problem is that it's targeted advertising of children.
So is all the advertising run during morning cartoons, and that targets an even younger demo than 13-17 year olds.
Those ads are bad, but instagram and its ilk are quite addictive. If don't think it's ok to turn a large group of children into screen zombies because "ads during cartoons".
Children can't interact with these ads to get into the wheel of more ads targeting their specific tastes. Very different level, and degree.
Yes
What does wad mean? Dead?
And it's frankly disgusting that some countries allow such ads.
Adolescents are particularly sensitive to addiction. And guess what instagram tries to do?
Is it to create a utopia of peace and harmony for those who live on this planet?
No? I didn't think so either.
The problem, at least in some countries, is that the laws regarding targeting children and teenagers are VERY strict, to the point where it almost doesn't make sense to do it.
By having an "unknown" category, you could argue that you had no way of knowing that you where targeting children, so you can't be responsible. The other party could also easily argue that they put those under 18 in that group to protect their privacy and age.
If you however DO know that these are primarily children and teenagers, then you have to follow the rather strict laws. In Denmark for instance, that means that you cannot encourage purchasing or even advertise certain products. Take the stupid product that is Prime (the drink), health professionals argues that it's harmful to children, but their are also the only ones who really buy it in any meaningful volume. If you knew that you where targeting Prime ads to those under 16 in Denmark, you would be breaking the law.
If advertising companies where to follow the laws online (technically they have to, but tries to avoid it), you could effectively reduce the number of ads you see on social media by stating that you're only 16, because you couldn't be targeted in the same way.
they put those under 18 in that group to protect their privacy and age
That's not how it works!
The project disregarded Google’s rules that prohibit personalising and targeting ads to under-18s, including serving ads based on demographics. It also has policies against the circumvention of its own guidelines, or “proxy targeting”.
When I was a child, the conspiracy theory among kids was that Coca-Cola inserted subliminal ads by interlacing a can of Coke within TV series or movies. I cannot believe reality surpasses all those fantasies without scrutiny.
Even political propaganda between left and right wings, 1984, and other similar scenarios sound like satire.
When I was a child, the conspiracy theory among kids was that Coca-Cola inserted subliminal ads by interlacing a can of Coke within TV series or movies. I cannot believe reality surpasses all those fantasies.
Reader: Yeah, that happened...
Narrator: It did: https://www.businessinsider.com/subliminal-ads-2011-5
No, the idea that you can insert a single frame into standard video formats and have it subliminally influence you is an urban legend.
You can try it with any video editing software. A single frame at 30 or 60 fps is extremely visible. It's not passing by your conscious awareness undetected. The flash is obvious and you can easily read a word of text or recognize a logo or someone's face.
Yes, scientific source "Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice" [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
That link literally starts by describing how the idea of flashing a frame of Coca-Cola was a hoax. It completely supports what I said.
Like I said, test it yourself in a video editor. You'll immediately see how implausible it is.
Yes, I agree and added a reference. That's why I told my story.
Wait... Nintendo and Disney targets children, including those too young to know what Ads are.
Why are these different ethics?
(They are not, both of those companies have created literal fanatics by adulthood. Even I cannot avoid beating each Zelda game despite not enjoying a single Zelda game since WW)
I live in an area where advertising is not allowed to target children directly.
As a result, the adverts don't show children playing with the toys, but present the toys in a bland setting as potential gifts for adults to buy. They will show an adult happy with a purchase. In short, they simply cannot address children directly through television. However, it's a fine line and you hardly ever see advertisements for toys unless there's a clear educational value. That's my understanding at least.
Most Nintendo adverts show young adults playing on a sofa or on the go in a train.
Wow, that's really interesting.
Having grown up on cartons filled with ads for toys showing kids playing with the toys, it literally never even crossed my mind that anyone would consider that objectionable, let alone pass laws against it.
At most parents would be annoyed because their kid would pester them for a toy, but I've literally never heard anyone suggest that the advertising should be banned.
(Advertising alcohol or tobacco of course is today different.)
You've definitely made me wonder how childhood might be different without ads for children. On the other hand, when I grew up you couldn't avoid commercials. Now kids watch everything through streaming where you can generally eliminate the commercials anyways.
I have definitely heard it from parents, some kids get really insufferable during holiday season with all the frantic toy ads on tv (back when they still watched tv, I guess).
Should they show adult ads to children instead?
Here in Sweden it's illegal to do so and you only find advertisements directed at children on stations operating from abroad.
Since I got kids I realized how they are the weakest link in the chain and are targeted by everyone. From tobacco (at the end nobody starts smoking at 30), to "free" cartoons (peppa pig backpack is not free, though), school book sellers. Heck, even the school this year pressured to put my kid in their social media.
There is a whole world of people making their living out of your kids.
Sorry for the rant. This is just another two. Does not surprise me.
Also sugary sweets are aimed at children, for whom a dose of sugar probably hits much harder. As someone who managed to quit sugar, it was like a drug addiction.
Yes, indeed it is a drug addiction.
This is just another two.
These two control around half of the online ad industry, though
Yes. And as parent one must fight against multiple multibillion dollar industries. Starting with food ending with toys, games, influencers and everything in between.
I was neutral when I started working in cellphone industry and kids were small. Now when I see how teens siting in the corner watching worthless stupid YouTube videos on the phone for hours I don’t feel well. Luckily I quit that industry and think it’s a cousin of big tobacco at the end despite advertisements telling some other things.
even the school this year pressured to put my kid in their social media.
Wow
I think that nowadays industry flavored joke of “you either die a hero or live long enough to become…” should end with Google/Meta.
What a dirtbags.
Remember when everyone cheered when Google was winning lawsuits because they were the small guys?
Yes. How gray is your beard?
"Don't be evil."
There's plenty of marketing targeted towards children outside of Big Tech. What's the difference when they do it?
Funny enough, fireship had a good take on it just the other day. "As a tech company you either go bankrupt as a hero or live long enough to become an illegal monoply"
Funnily enough, this is one case where contextual advertising would actually work better than what we have now.
With contextual advertising, you could very easily target children with very specific interests and/or in specific age groups by targeting the ads at the videos they most often watch.
this is one case where contextual advertising would actually work better than what we have now.
No. No. No. That a) would involve tracking and b) what we have now are ads based on what you bought/ have looked at. I already have an 'x', why would i want more ads for it...or ads for what some algorithm thinks i might be interested in, related to it. Unless I choose to.
Contextual ads wouldn’t require tracking as it’s just advertising based on the page context, ie a video about a videogame will have different ads than an article about remortgaging.
There should probably be laws in place to prevent advertising targeting children though, regardless of the advertising mechanism.
This might violate the policy against "proxy targeting"
No. No. No. That a) would involve tracking and b) what we have now are ads based on what you bought/ have looked at.
Contextual advertising is what's in print magazines. Audience ads next to articles, topical ads mid-story, or category ads grouped with like ads.
Market data science is tragically fascinating. It's a superpower, capable of being used for eithger good or bad.
What would it look like when it is being used for good? Not being a smartass implying its existence, legitimately wondering.
From what I hear the chinese Tik-Tok equivalent Douyin does manage to educate and raise STEM interest and help... https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/10i4gks/tiktok_in_c...
There's lots of products that people really need and could help improve their lives, but they don't know about the existence of the problem/solution.
For example
"Hey do you have hip pain when walking down the stairs? Turns out this is extremely common and we solved it with this special walking stick. Click here to buy the walking stick"
"Were you an Iraq war veteran who served between 2004 and 2006? Turns out the government owes you money. Click here to get it"
"Do you like Blink 182? Turns out they are actually touring again and they are in your city next weekend. Buy tickets now"
There's tons of stuff out there that would be a win-win transaction, if only ppl knew about it.
By good you mean profit?
Nothing will change as long as C-suite roles keep breaking the law and walking away scott free. Also goes for the investors promoting this behavior at startup level.
It's all a natural consequence of capitalism. Heavy regulation is needed for even a semblance of a healthy society, but unfortunately capitalism's incentives themselves make regulation an uphill battle.
A mixed economy with strong regulation seems to be the best system we've come up with so far. Unfortunately it's a tough sell because we're obsessed about GDP numbers and making like go up instead of actually improving our lives. We prefer having a couple trillion-$ companies wreaking havoc on our societies and especially on teenagers and children than not having those companies.
This seems to be the motivation of EU regulators. However, regulation also needs to be enforcible in a global setting. Also one needs to understand collateral damage to smaller enterprises (recent EU regulations only tries to target large platforms) and economy as a whole by leaving large legal uncertainties. In the end also with heavy regulations often the most ignorant players will survive. We should rather make sure try that taxes are paid where the potential damages occur.
The "big company clauses" as you say do solve most of those issues: they avoid burdening small enterprises with unreasonable amounts of regulation, but they ensure (very) big companies with huge influence which act for all purposes as public platforms, and not merely as "normal" companies which happen to be very big, do have extra impositions.
The Instagram campaign deliberately targeted a group of users labelled as “unknown” in its advertising system, which Google knew skewed towards under-18s, these people said. Meanwhile, documents seen by the FT suggest steps were taken to ensure the true intent of the campaign was disguised.
The project disregarded Google’s rules that prohibit personalising and targeting ads to under-18s, including serving ads based on demographics. It also has policies against the circumvention of its own guidelines, or “proxy targeting”.
…However, Google did not deny using the “unknown” loophole, adding: “We’ll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies.”
Meanwhile, documents seen by the FT suggest steps were taken to ensure the true intent of the campaign was disguised.
I read the article, but it didn’t go into the content of those documents. Would be interesting to know.
As always with these massive corporate failures/crimes it turns out no one in any important position knew anything and it was a small group of low-level bad actors causing all the trouble. How sad that all these companies are plagued with this while the leadership is just trying to virtuously do good business!
Thank you
Teenage mental health crisis is web scale!
"How we scaled depressify.js to over 100 million consumers"
“We’ll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies.”
Useful would be a chronology of when:
* Individuals learned/knew about the rule violations.
* Individuals were arguably rewarded.
* Individuals were disciplined.
That might give a sense of how bad the infection is, and whether their immune system is on top of it.
Still waiting for cookies to be removed
If the executives figure out a way to actually guarantee no ads targeting children, Mr Beast will be crushed.
We could also make it illegal to advertise to children at all. Wouldn't that be funny if all of us started clicking "I am below 18" :D
Dream bigger? We could make it illegal to advertise period.
Tax ad revenue as a vice like at alcohol and tobacco levels, or higher.
It's not an abused substance, it's violence.
I hate ads, but this is not a winning argument. Instead of winning people over to the sympathetic cause (nobody really LIKES ads besides google and meta employees) you alienate people
Ads can be likeable under the right conditions. Who doesn't want to learn about something that will actually improve their life? Which is also ideal for advertisers. Who wants to pay to advertise to an audience that doesn't want their product?
Google and Facebook, in the early days, thought they could use copious amounts of data to tailor the ads to the user such that they would only be subjected to those which are likeable, but then the audience got skittish about having that much information collected on them. And so we now just get whatever random ad happens to be in the queue – which, indeed, is statistically unlikely to be in line with what you actually need, and therefore unlikable.
There’s a subtle error in your beliefs about the motivations of FB and Google. They are incentivized not to give users useful ads, but effective ones. The goal isn’t to improve your life. For example, something you buy because its marketed very well, but then never use, is a success for FB or Google and a loss for you. You should frame them less positively as a consequence. I also want to point out that it’s not skittishness; skittishness implies animalistic irrationality. People are right to be afraid of the control that a powerful actor can exert over them if it knows everything they do.
Nobody would buy something without an understanding of it being beneficial.
I'll grant you that understandings can be faulty. One may learn that there was no benefit. But that's outside of the ad itself. Invalidating your hypotheseses is an important part of the scientific method.
Explain sugar cereals, soda, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc.
The advertisements create the misunderstanding. "Lucky Charms are part of a complete breakfast" etc. No normal person under normal circumstances would think that marshmallows or cookies are part of a healthy meal if you asked them directly to think about it.
What's to explain? They feel good when consumed, and thus improve one's life, even if only for a fleeting moment.
Who is buying Lucky Charms because they find them disgusting, but somehow see them as being important? Let's be real: People only (continue to, at least – they may buy once just to try) buy Lucky Charms if they like consuming them.
Have... you met a teenager?
I'm failing to see the point of this example, as I don't think I've never met a single person who found their first cigarette enjoyable. Is your experience that people buy their first and second pack out of enjoyment of the taste?
Even if it's something you want, if there is competition in the space, then since Internet ads work on a real-time auction system, you can expect that the winning bidder is the entity that has the most available margin to make. i.e. it is the worst possible deal for you the customer. So e.g. when you search for something on Amazon and see sponsored results, you can expect that those are the worst possible deal.
I don't think it's the random ads that bother me and others so much, those are easy to tune out. Nobody cares about billboards. Random junk ads on websites are annoying, but I don't think they're doing much societal harm.
On the contrary, it's the hyper targetting of ads, nested in content algorithmically maximixed for engagement, that I object to.
I've worked in the ad industry, so I've certainly heard and appreciate the whole "we're just educating consumers about products they might be interested in" angle. That's fine, academically speaking, if that's all advertising was. However, advertising more often than not attempts to pray on people's emotions to generate demand for a product. And when we know exactly who someone is, it's SO much easier to do that.
As a perfect example, I woke up last Saturday, started scrolling IG, and saw an ad with a photo of a miserable looking middle aged man lying in bed, asking "Are you tired of feeling like a horrible father because of your drinking problems? Try Reframe!" (No idea what the exact phrasing was, but close enough to that.)
Yes, I'd in fact had drinks with friends the night before. And yes, I'm a middle aged dad. I thought the targetting was pretty hilarious, so I laughed and shared it with my wife and friends. But also, Reframe is praying on my feelings of guilt and shame in an attempt to sell me their shitty app.
I can laugh it off, but I'm not so sure your typical teenager could.
Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that this Reframe is some miracle app that will truly do what you think it claims to. Would that not be an ideal way to get the solution into your hands if you have that problem?
You're not going to feel guilt or shame unless you already are under the understanding that you're not, in this case, being then parent you wish to become. Anyone who takes an interest in this ad will do so only because they actually want to make their life better by becoming a better parent and drinking less, and are seeking solutions to see that through.
It seems the only problem here is that the app is shitty.
I would hazard a guess that no one likes ads except the likes of google and meta SHAREHOLDERS).
I was incredulous but many normal people actually enjoy ads.
Many people have also never experienced a world where ads do not exist. I use so many layers of adblocking that whenever I use a vanilla VM or devices, I'm stunned at how shockingly bad the internet experience is for most people.
I mean they can often be useful.
This is not the first time I'm hearing someone say free speech is violence, but it is the first time they actually meant it about free speech and weren't covering up something else by calling it that.
Not who shared that but there's a concept of non-violent communication that they may be referring to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
Coercion -> force -> violence
Forcing ads onto kids = violence?
From my experience, that concept is mostly used as weapon and shield by the worst kind of people, to let them get away with their manipulative bs.
Speaking clearly sometimes means saying things that are uncomfortable to hear.
That sounds more like gaslighting.
Non-violent communication isn't at all about manipulation. It's about discussing behaviors and their impact on the person vs attacking and defending in circles that go nowhere.
One can couch their words in the language of nonviolence and still be manipulative, cruel or discriminatory. It can and does act as a form of social camouflage, because humans are shitty and a method of communication will not safeguard against predators.
You can’t make people harmless, but you can force them to innovate different ways to harm others.
Yeah, I get the potential, and I'm not saying it's a bad idea.
It's just that in practice I've only seen it used by morons to shut down discussions they don't feel like having.
Exactly this.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been attacking that trope as factually incorrect and unhelpful for almost a decade now:
"Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence : A claim increasingly heard on campus will make them more anxious and more willing to justify physical harm." (2017)
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-it...
Why is free speech free? If you think people (and by extension businesses) should be allowed to express themselves that's one thing, but advertising is importantly distinct from that. It's protected speech in most of the Anglosphere to say you don't like some person or group, but not to maliciously damage someone's reputation or incite hatred. I can imagine an analogous situation where you're free to express that you think your product is good, but not to incite irrational desire in consumers or try so place information about your product in places that are difficult to avoid, like public billboards.
On free speech vs violent acts of speech (if we want to keep using that term)
A possible compromise that might work is to protect _good faith_ speech while working against bad faith speech.
You do a disservice to anyone actually exposed to real violence. I’m sure they’d prefer advertising to violence any day
Maybe not violence, but what word more accurately describes the non-consensual exploitation of human psychology for massive profit?
Limit advertising budgets to some percentage of reported (and taxed) income.
Solve multiple problems at once :)
So the big companies can spend more and the startups wouldn’t be able to advertise at all. That’s not solving anything.
There may be some more-creative options out there too.
For example, in Washington State there isn't a blanket prohibition on signs advertising to people on the highway, but anything advertised must be available for purchase on the property. So far, that's been enough to curb companies from lining the highways with walls of giant billboards.
So--just spitballing here--imagine if people had a legal right to use and sell software that blocks ads or objectionable material from their view or on devices they own, and how that could lead to ad-ecosystem changes.
Or you can do like a few different states have done and just fucking ban billboards, and the world doesn't end, and the economy doesn't crash, and the world is an explicitly better place.
So much stupid nonsense just to not make the world a better place and I don't understand it. You don't need to be creative.
Speaking of which, at this point it's only a matter of time before some big name attempts to put a satellite in orbit that is also a billboard, so you can ALWAYS see their advertising in the nights sky, because it is not currently being used for advertising so, you know, they want to fix that. If we don't ban it now, we WILL have our night sky blocked out by advertising at some point. Companies already use big drone displays to do this.
And I guarantee you people will insist "It's not a big deal, we need advertising, we don't need to block all of it"
A ridiculous concept — the only people that win in that are the incumbent producers.
“I make a better widget at a lower price than BigCorp” — yet nobody will ever find out about it because advertising that fact would be illegal. Journalists would become supremely powerful and (more) supremely corrupt. Just like radio DJs in the 20th century determined what music sold (and were often bribed accordingly,) the same thing will happen for literally everything. Journalism would become even more like advertising but people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I don’t want the equivalent of radio DJs determining what products and services win.
Many professional sports would disappear, Motorsports, soccer, many olympic sports would cease to exist at the highest level. The Olympics themselves would no longer be broadcast (who would pay for it?) Kid’s little league teams would lose local business sponsors. Everything would be pay-per-view assuming the economics worked at all. Newspapers would all shut down. TV stations would disappear. Radio would be limited to small amateur stations — if that because the moment the host mentions a product, service, song, they’d be sued (wrongly or rightly) for potentially advertising. New restaurants would never survive (how will anyone know you exist: Signage and logos are all advertising.)
Basically it would be North Korea with people shopping for inferior state-produced goods at inferior state run supermarkets reading state-approved messages about the greatness of the Dear Leader and his progeny.
Even word of mouth referrals would be subject to lawsuits “can you prove you didn’t get a free cookie in exchange for saying something to your friends about this bakery?”
An absolutely dystopian nightmare.
And if there were an advertising ban, you can bet politicians would exempt themselves from such a ban.
That is overly simplistic. Advertising is a great way to make people aware of things they may find useful. Without a good method to spread the news no one could sell their innovations.
But i do agree that most ads are annoying.
We could make it illegal for minors to use the internet at all. It is too dangerous. Similar to driving. That would solve so many current problems.
I think it's more interesting when you scope it to mass media system. I think kids using the internet to communicate directly with their peers and family makes a lot of sense. Kids consuming an infinite amount of media and trying to broadcast themselves to the whole world is very often unhealthy.
I think this is also true if adults, but I think kids are particularly susceptible to unhealthy habits / addictions around mass media systems.
Respectfully disagree - their peers often make an unhealthy environment on the internet. Kids need in-person communication and interactions, its necessary for healthy development. The internet looks like it provides social interaction, but it actually does not provide what kids need. They should interact with their peers elsewhere, synchronously.
I feel like interacting with a moderate-sized set of real peers is workable - like chat rooms on AIM with the kids you know from school. Kids have always had unsupervised time with their peers.
Where it breaks down, is when you get a whole ecosystem populated entirely by kids and those trying to make money off of them.
No, most of the problem with internet interaction is how the human brain considers the username saying things to you on AIM is NOT the same as the dude you hang out with every day in real life, and more importantly, the usernames you don't know in real life are just vague spirits your brain is much more willing to demonize. This exact same effect is the main cause of roadrage and why everyone is such an asshole when you put them in steel boxes and have them interact on the road.
It is NOT SOCIALIZATION to talk to people on the internet. Your brain simply does not treat it the same way.
Kids are fine interacting in person at school and other public places. They don't need this social media bullshit, and even private messaging systems like AIM or MSN aren't really that great.
In the US, minors can get a driver's license at 16 in most places, and at 15 in a few I've seen.
And a person of any age can drive a car on private property.
There should be operating systems just for minkrs that are devoid of tracking and using software for kids like the kiddle search engine and social media for kids (not the one we all know of)
the number of websites that would complain such OS and browser is unsupported, is skyrocketing. thats a blight that requires mitigation any time soon.
This is already the case for e.g. gambling ads in certain countries. Recently I saw the first website that was basically begging the user to "please be honest" on the age popup, indicating a good number of people have caught on to just clicking "under 21". Of course I still clicked "under 21".
A tragic story would be one where folks in positions of power in these organizations saw these crises coming from a million miles away, tried to avoid disaster, and failed.
I don't think this is a tragic story.
I think this is a rather boring and formulaic plot we're seeing over and over: the story of late-stage capitalism and the application of value-extraction to human social structures resulting in comically terrible outcomes.
The line has to go up, and the slack has to be taken out of every last source of revenue. Like that story that was here yesterday about insurance companies monitoring customer's insured assets with drones and AI. Every unexploited dollar left on the table is slack, and a perfect market leaves no dollar unexploited. Therefore a more perfect market can be built with more perfect machine-powered decisions to more perfectly screw you out of every nickel they can.
"Oops, sorry your brother cut his leg and you had to speed to the hospital, but you better get a second job if you wanna keep your car."
Fuck this shit. Fuck all of it. And fuck all the status quo warriors sitting on the sidelines bleating about "it's just the way it is" because the axe hasn't swung for them yet. You're safe now because the market has more vulnerable people to grind up first, but rest assured, as it churns through them, your time will come too.
And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman.
There's a reason we have these rules, and the problem of better enforcement leading to more application of the rules isn't a late-stage-capitalism problem; it's a "rules require flexibility" problem (but it's not great if the nature of the flexibility is "you didn't get caught").
Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy.
Secondly, we're not even talking about authorities surveilling you to prevent safety situations (which would, by itself, already be plenty vile enough). We're talking your insurance company checking on you to make sure your roof doesn't have moss on it, and jacking your price/nuking your policy if they feel your behavior is too "risky," according to a model you (and probably they) don't fully understand how it works.
There's so much wrong with this and if you don't think so I doubt a comment here is going to change your mind. If you place ANY value at all on personal autonomy and privacy, I don't believe it's possible to, at the same time, say your insurance company by virtue of insuring your car, has the right to surveil that car at a time and via a method of their choosing, with no notification, and with no oversight, solely for the purpose of jacking up your price and/or rewriting your contract on the fly. These relationships already heavily, heavily bias in the favor of the corporation. Do they really need YET MORE unearned, unchecked authority in our lives?!
> Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy.
Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)?
Or are they, these days, buying data on your driving from stuff like traffic cams (wouldn't be surprising, sorry if I'm giving them the idea now)?
In the thread I saw yesterday, can't spend the time to find it atm, the topic was specifically about an insurance company using drones and AI to ascertain that someone's roof had moss growing on it. The homeowner fully acknowledged that this was a lapse in his upkeep, but also, I am incredibly opposed to the notion that a company can surveil people as such simply because they buy insurance from them.
Not at all times, of course.
But if we built the technology to do it whenever someone is operating a multi-ton vehicle on a shared roadway (similar to how we require police to wear body-cams), I wouldn't actually be sad about it or feel unduly watched.
I do concur, however, that routing it through the insurance company is pretty sub-optimal; I'd much prefer a public authority that I could vote out if they screw up.
You’re on a website run by venture capitalists who use this platform to increase the value of their portfolios… so unless you’re an agent provocateur, your comment needs to be read as ironic performance art because I hate to break it to you - you’re also part of the problem
I operated under this mental model originally as well. But, based on all available information, while HN allows running ads for YC portfolio companies and uses it for other promo purposes (YC applications), I have come to the conclusion tha pg, dang, et el are running this place as part science project, part public good, funded by YC returns (which, while not exact, can be predicted with high confidence from public information wrt portfolio liquidity events).
Certainly, you need funding, look what happened to Reddit's quest to squeeze community for returns. HN runs lean (two servers in colo, a few mods) and small (less is more), so they can be more flexible in what they're optimizing for. I will argue there is something intangible that exists they are cultivating. More for another thread, but I would be cautious about saying "You cannot speak truth about capitalism failings because YC runs HN and YC is a VC fund." Simplicity is rare, and the evidence does not indicate this forum runs to maximize profit.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1259257-we-should-improve-so...
If the problem you're referring to is capitalism, it is not possible to not participate in capitalism because capitalism operates every nation state and every portion of the planet.
If the problem you're referring to is venture capital, I don't work at a VC firm and have no intention to.
I'm beyond being shocked by this kind of behavior but it is still striking to me how some of the most profitable companies in history will go out of their way to do shady deals for a slight short term increase in their record profits.
The resulting reputational damage and future risk to their monopoly revenue has got to make deals like this -EV for the company in the long run, but decision makers at these companies are paid more for short term profits and they know it.
Reputational damage is pretty easy to limit for companies that can control what news a huge majority of people see.
If the "Craftsman" brand of tools didn't go completely out of business despite removing the lifetime warranty and just slapping the brand name on cheap chinese tools, then "Reputational damage" does not exist.
Well said!
Capitalism is structured in such a way that we are throwing all other values out in the (short term) pursuit of money.
Who needs nature, mental and physical health if you made a buck or two? The perverse incentives of capitalism will never create good social change, and we are seeing it now more and more in late stage capitalism.
This is a problem that could be solved with serious penalties (say, 20 years in prison for executives involved) and serious enforcement.
It's really not though. All that money goes somewhere, and not just in their pockets. Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen, because that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit.
Someone on HN [1] recommended "Broken Code," [2] a book about the various people who tried to fix Facebook/Meta from the inside and noped out. Highly recommend having purchased and read. "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -- Captain G. M. Gilbert
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969211
[2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712678/broken-code-...
(keep those book recommendations coming)
This being hacker news, I can't help but appreciate the pure evil genius of this. It reminds me of some other cases cunning corporate ingenuity:
- Monsanto and their "terminator" seeds that prevents farmers from planting seeds they harvest, requiring them to purchase new seeds for every planting.[1]
- Volkswagen and how they programmed diesel engines to activate emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#%22Terminator%22_seed...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Monsanto isn’t forcing anyone to buy their product. Farmers use it because they’re better than uncopyeighted seeds.
They are forced in the sense that it's a prisoner's dilemma type of thing: Farmers would be better off if none of them used exploitative seeds. However since they are competing with farmers who are using those seeds then have to do so as well in order to stay competitive.
I dont see how that is the case. How does one farmer using monsanto seeds mean another needs to as well? Each farmers seed choice has no effect on others choices. If the monsanto seeds cost more than they were worth farmers wouldnt use them. In fact saying that you need to use their seeds to be competitive makes it clear that you understand that the seeds are worth it, you just wish they were free or cheaper. But in order to create these seeds monsanto needs to be paid.
Truat me, you won't convince anyone here. Accosing to left wingers, Monsanto is the devil incarnate for having the gall to save millions of lives while also earning a profit. If you're looking for some sort of logic, you won't find it because there isn't any.
Kind of misleading to just state it like this if your source points out that Monsanto never sold this, pledged 25 years ago they won’t do this, and according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_tech... , they also didn’t invent it.
This sounds eerily familiar with how big tobacco targeted underage kids to get them hooked on their products in the 60's and 70's.
You don't even have to go that far back. Remember Juul in the 2010s?
Juul sent representatives to schools who told kids that Juuls weren’t addictive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/juul-teens-vaping....
Tobacco companies have always targeted kids. In the early 20th century most baseball cards were produced by sweets and tobacco manufacturers
Looking at the stories here in the last two days, lots in HN are more worried with the location of Twitter headquarters...( Will never mention that letter...)
Don't want to go too off topic, but I legitmately don't understand the fuss. It went from California to California. If there's any forced moves to SoCal, my condolances, but I didn't get that vibe from that thread that there were a bunch of disgruntled workers.
Are people still that interested in trying to join Twitter c. 2024? I'm desperate enough in terms of money to accept if I was just handed an offer, but I sure as hell am not doing anything more than 2 interviews before my interest nosedives.
For all the speculation about the move, the reason is simple. Twitter is going to launch a payments system, San Francisco has a tax on gross receipts, which is so unfair to payments processing companies that several others - square, stripe, and block - moved out of SF to avoid paying that tax, and Twitter is simply following suite. it's too inside baseball for the average reader to follow, so we're left with conspiracy theories as to why they're moving HQ.
Heaven forbid someone being shown ads for things that interest him. All this hand-wringing about privacy seems to me to be producing a lot of noise for minimal practical benefit. I don't see harms in ad targeting.
The harms, in my opinion, is that hyper-consumerism is an addiction. These methods are intended as a way to get impressionable and vulnerable groups hooked on various products, for the benefit of the manufacturer.
Children cannot make good decisions (generally) and they often have poor impulse control. Building the habit of spending money on random sparkly shit they don't need ensure that, as adults, they will be good consumers. And by that I mean materialistic and poorer than they have to be.
It's no surprise that these ads play into the most intrinsic human emotions for manipulation. They target social status, perception of self, pleasure. I see it as no different than sparkling lights on a slot machine. A way to manipulate the mind and build a money-burning addiction.
" nce you've collected enough data on every internet user " I guess by legal I can force companies not to collect data from me. (I am not a kid). I just happen not to live in the US. But this article reads more like a US problem.
Google has yet to experience significant penalties due to their Jedi Blue price-fixing scheme ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue ). Perhaps this story covers some other set of claims that will be broken out of the larger Jedi Blue case.
After all, Google fought very hard and farted out a cashier's check to the US Gov to avoid a jury trial in one of their ad monopoly cases https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-ad-tech-virginia...