The democratic issue with Facebook and other SoMes remains as long as there isn’t a record of what people see on their walls.
I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans, but here you have to be rather public about your advertising and who it targets. You obviously can’t tell who exactly sees a poster on a public wall, but you can get a general picture of how advertising is utilised.
The one place you can’t though is on SoMe because there is no record of your personal wall. Facebook at least makes overall spending public now, unlike LinkedIn and others, but no one can tell how the advertising that the money buys is targeted.
This is an issue because hearing something enough times changes your perspective on reality. But more than that, we have to take the SoMes word for it when they say they aren’t targeting children with tobacco, sugar or toy commercials, which is illegal here.
So it’s interesting that Facebook does these things to tools that might track what they won’t willingly provide.
Which is great, but what we need is campaign wise transparency. Facebook is actually ahead of its competition in that you can see things like advertising spending, as an example I can see how much each Danish political party spend on Facebook campaigns. Of course I could already do this by looking in their budgets, but it’s still more than other social media platforms.
What we need, however, is it to be able to pull data from each campaign, see what democracies they target and how many times they appear on peoples wall. It doesn’t have to go into “moksly saw this 15 times” more in the range of “in the group of x, y individuals were shown this add z times at these hours” and so on.
This would make it more akin to the advertisement data we have on almost all other mediums. I personally think we should require something similar from Google, but they manage to sneak below political and public notice enough for that to have widespread support.
Sounds like the difference is that only I can see how Facebook targeted me, rather than e.g. consumer interests organisations or government watchdogs being able to see how an organisation targets in general.
This is true for "ads". I also get a flood of "suggested for you" links which seem indistinguishable, are almost certainly paid content, and have no such labeling.
Some of this is benign enough, like all the inexplicable videos of rollercoaster rides or the Crafty Panda nonsense. Some of it seems somewhat nefarious, like the very family-friendly, feel-good, decidedly non-political suggestions for things like Cute Cat Content at the EXTREMELY political Epoch Times.
I mean, come on. All systems can be gamed. Facebook will still, for a fee, put any content you want in front of any user you want in a completely untrackable way. And that's why they freaked out about this extension.
And it only guesses that I'll enjoy clearly commercial content and not any of the community stuff related to things I actually interact with? Really? That seems oddly suspicious.
I gotta say, I don't believe you. I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm. Never once. If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
If you want to argue that these folks aren't spending money that ends up in Facebook's pocket in order for Facebook to put their content in front of my eyeballs... then I'm just going to laugh at you, sorry.
I mean, just on first principles your argument is ridiculous. If Facebook didn't see benefit from putting this garbage in front of me that I never click on, then why would it be putting garbage in front of me that I never click on? Clearly Facebook wants me to click on it!
Is it plausible that the reason that the reason that the "Suggested" links show you commercial content is because someone other than Facebook has manipulated Facebook's algorithm (in a way analogous to SEO) rather than paying Facebook?
I've probably logged on to facebook fewer than 7 times, so I have very little experience with it, and so I wouldn't know.
Fine. But remember, you can still hate Facebook and it can still be a crappy platform even though you're wrong about the explicit claims you've been arguing.
> And it only guesses that I'll enjoy clearly commercial content and not any of the community stuff related to things I actually interact with? Really? That seems oddly suspicious.
Yeah, they're kinda "dumb." These companies have incredible engineers but they still screw up really simple things.
> I gotta say, I don't believe you. I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm.
This is clickbait content created by professional view arbitrage firms who use natural virality to make a buck. They are making money, but they aren't buying ads, they're selling them on their own websites.
> Never once. If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
This is exactly the argument. And it's not an argument, it's a fact, assuming you aren't just missing the "sponsored/ad" labels on Facebook.com. Facebook is promoting this crap because most people are likely to click it and they are optimizing for engagement so people come back and click more, including on ads.
> If you want to argue that these folks aren't spending money that ends up in Facebook's pocket in order for Facebook to put their content in front of my eyeballs... then I'm just going to laugh at you, sorry.
This is not what was said and nobody intelligent would say this. (Strawman argument)
> If Facebook didn't see benefit from putting this garbage in front of me that I never click on, then why would it be putting garbage in front of me that I never click on? Clearly Facebook wants me to click on it!
Their algorithm hasn't figured you out as well as it has others. They promote low quality clickbait content BECAUSE it leads to "engagement" and clicks. They want you to like being on Facebook, and constant clicking = addiction. But these are not ads, unless you're missing an obvious "sponsored/ads" label.
>> If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
> This is exactly the argument.
OK, then as mentioned I find that a specious and silly claim. My words above were that Suggested links constitute "Paid Content", and it seems you agree.
Here the argument is that "suggested content" is popular, and FB showing it gets people to use their platform more, which in turn lets FB expose them to more (paid) ads.
That's different to non-direct payments for the "suggested content", which is what you seem to believe is happening.
Here's the list of ad formats on Facebook[1], and I've worked closely with the biggest advertisers in the world who have dedicated Facebook support staff.
There is literally no way to give FB money for formats outside those (with the single exception of when new formats are introduced they often run experiments with large advertisers).
If you are so sure it is paid for, it should be easy to show the steps you need to take to buy it. Where?
If you are so sure it's _not_ commercial content you have lost the ability to distinguish real content from adverts.
That's a skill 7 years olds need to develop.
Maybe Facebook are being played, but not by anyone in my list of friends so they are complicit or we are expected to believe that they can't filter content by your social graph.
Potentially that's true: it does not paint a very good picture of The Social Network's ability to target ads.
More likely, Facebook have no real content for me because noone in my list of contacts posts on Facebook anymore and Facebook push this shitty content so thier pages are not bare. Perhaps one in ten is a real ad. It's still 100% low grade ads, just 90% is Facebook trying, and failing, to drive traffic for itself.
I imagine they logged me looking at the titles long enough to write them down as active user engagement.
The first "suggested for you" piece is this link[1], about the Australian cycling team's bronze medal in the team pursuit. I'm a cyclist and Australian, and can confirm this link is interesting to me. It's from SBS, which is one of Australia's publicly funded broadcasters.
It's not a paid ad.
> More likely, Facebook have no real content for me because noone in my list of contacts posts on Facebook anymore and Facebook push this shitty content so thier pages are not bare.
Exactly. If you are only seeing junk content from your friends, then the suggested content is likely to be junk stuff that is globally popular too. That doesn't somehow make it some secret paid ad, it's just junk. Same way the old Buzzfeed listicles were junk, but popular.
> If you are so sure it's _not_ commercial content you have lost the ability to distinguish real content from adverts. That's a skill 7 years olds need to develop.
You say you and your friends don't use FB much. Whereas I do, and have spend 5 or so years going very deep on their advertising work.
Perhaps I do actually know what I'm talking about here?
There is literally no way to pay for "suggested content".
The "suggested for you" content is typically Facebook trying to cross-sell you to other parts of the app. It's not an actual ad, but it's not entirely organic content either.
One of the product teams at Facebook mistakenly believes you'd be interested in using marketplace or whatever and has enough clout internally to get their stuff added to your feed.
> I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm. Never once.
Great. I have had nothing but the opposite experience. What now? If I can deconstruct your argument that easily, it must not be a very strong argument to start with.
> I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans
Apparently not just Americans... There are around 10k Americans living in Denmark [1], and around 1.3M Danes living in the US [2]. While I am sure that everyone you talk to in Denmark will tell you they love it there, that's due to the survival bias. The immigration streams tell the true story, which is that the Danes are voting with their feet and overcoming incredible financial and cultural challenges to move their families to the US.
With that in mind, no, I am not really keen on learning about all the wonderful hurdles your government has come up with to destroy every last bit of a chance that an entrepreneur has to advertise their business. Surely, the intentions were all good, but you know what they say about the path to hell...
> Danish Americans (Danish: Dansk-amerikanere) are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,300,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent.
And the history in the article goes back to the 1600s.
I think you need to reassess your sources and position.
Agree on the sources but not on the position. Perhaps we should limit the immigration stats to the last 50 years or something, but no amount of hair splitting will reverse the overall point - which is that far more Danes immigrate to the US than vice versa, despite the fact that there are far more Americans than Danes.
Btw, nothing against the Danes. There's no country in this world where the same is not true. You hear about the Swiss tax laws, or the German unions, or the Italian lifestyle, or the Swedish health care. And yet, all those people are playing the Green Card lottery (just like I did and everyone else I grew up with).
The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).
There are an estimated 30 to 35,000 Danes living in the US [1] (not Americans with Danish ancestry, which seems irrelevant).
By your own logic re: voting with your feet, it seems the conclusion should be the opposite.
> The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).
Your logic is reversed. Assuming that the US and Denmark have equally favorable living conditions, and the US population is 55 times larger, there would be a 55 times higher chance of a US citizen deciding to jump the fence than the other way around. The fact that this is not happening, shows that the US is perceived as a more desirable place to live.
This back and forth is so ... weird. You are trying to somehow use one metric of population and migrations to measure what I have to think is quality of life. Why not then just use studies that tried to measure this? Do you reject them because all Scandinavian countries score higher than the US?
I don't reject anything - there's no question that the median citizen lives a more comfortable life in Scandinavian countries than in the US. But there's a nuance to human nature that might be difficult to admit, and that's that people are inherently ambitious, to the point that both things can be true at the same time:
1) The median Scandinavian citizen is living a more comfortable life than the median US citizen
2) As a Scandinavian citizen, you're more likely to want to live in the US than as a US citizen to want to move to a Scandinavian country.
If you found this exchange weird, I hope you didn't find me disrespectful or anything of that sort, but more like challenging some long-firm beliefs that have been repeated so many times that it's difficult to hear any other point of view. And if you still don't agree with me, that's totally fine - I might very well be wrong. The whole point of being on HN is to hear POVs that are contrarian and hopefully thoughtful.
I think your 2) can easily be misconstrued to mean something else. At least, "want/desire" does not logically follow from migration stats. There are way more important factors that affect this metric.
Not to mention that a generally poor population are stuck in the US, while for the upper income brackets actually have it OK in the US. While in Scandinavia, almost everyone has the means to travel the world. Even store clerks, or otherwise "minimum income workers".
I would agree with that - the US population that has the means to leave doesn't have the incentive to do so, and those who have the incentive don't have the means. Conversely, the Danes who are too ambitious for the way that Denmark is set up likely have the means to leave.
Or that it's easier for more Danes to migrate to the US than vice versa because they're more familiar with the language and culture of the US than vice versa.
There are so many potential reasons; it's silly to draw conclusions about what country is "better" (on some underspecified scale) based on just migration stats.
As ridiculous as your comment is, there has been less than 100000 people to move to the US from Denmark since our advertising laws were passed, around 70000 of them have either returned, changed citizenship or are dead.
No one surveyed by Gallup has left because of political reasons and between 70-80% of them would prefer to return home if their work allowed it.
Oh wow, that's just silly. You're talking about immegrants from about 400 years ago. They were colonialists exploiting a "virgin" land for profit.
This has nothing to do with contemporary entrepreneurship, for all intent and purposes these Danish Americans are Americans.
Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.
If you read the children comments, you will see a more nuanced take on those stats.
> Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.
I don't doubt that; the US is not optimized for the median citizen. But neither is Hacker News - I suppose a median community would be some kind of an offline newspaper with readers' comments. If that excites you, more power to you.
Well I find it immoral to optimize for high quality of life while financially oppressing the majority.
If the US at least enabled high quality of life for the majority, with exceptional QOF for the few, then great, but that's not happening.
So It's not about being excited about something, it's about being anti oligarchy and pro democracy and (true) freedom.
I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans, but here you have to be rather public about your advertising and who it targets. You obviously can’t tell who exactly sees a poster on a public wall, but you can get a general picture of how advertising is utilised.
The one place you can’t though is on SoMe because there is no record of your personal wall. Facebook at least makes overall spending public now, unlike LinkedIn and others, but no one can tell how the advertising that the money buys is targeted.
This is an issue because hearing something enough times changes your perspective on reality. But more than that, we have to take the SoMes word for it when they say they aren’t targeting children with tobacco, sugar or toy commercials, which is illegal here.
So it’s interesting that Facebook does these things to tools that might track what they won’t willingly provide.