Silicon Valley wants you to know they are quite upset about all the horrible racist ads they’ve cheerfully allowed for years, now that everyone has found out about them. So, they are making a great kerfuffle about banning the ads – which of course had to be vetted by them before appearing – and hope we will all be happy now since they’ve been so proactive.
I’m a coder. There is no possible way three huge tech companies could make the exact same blithering idiot mistakes that somehow allowed noxious ads to appear and have it be a genuine mistake. It was by design. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Advertisers wanted ads targeting those who hate Blacks and were perkily told they could expand the range of the ad by also targeting those who hate Jews. I’ve run ad campaigns like these. The ads have to be approved, either by software or a human. Therefore, the ads were vetted and were allowed to appear.
But wait! Silicon Valley says such ad targeting has disappeared. Why it’s almost like they could turn it on and off effortlessly. Twitter was especially comical and unconvincing, saying darn it, those bad words were blacklisted yet somehow appeared in ads anyway. So we are sorry and the bad words truly are blacklisted now. I totally believe them. How about you?
Excerpts from a Quartz article:
Typing in keyword suggestions (which advertisers use to build their ads and figure out who to target) like “why do jews ruin everything” led to the system generating more keyword suggestions like “jews ruin the world” and “jewish parasites.” Buzzfeed was also able to build and launch a campaign around the phrase “black people ruin neighborhoods.”
Facebook allowed advertisers to target categories and ideas such as “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world,’” based on interest Facebook users had expressed on the social network and terms with which they had used to describe themselves.
A Twitter representative told Quartz about the Daily Beast’s report:
The terms cited in this story have been blacklisted for several years and we are looking into why the campaign cited in this story were able to run for a very short period of time. Twitter actively prohibits and prevents any offensive ads from appearing on our platform, and we are committed to understanding 1) why this happened, and 2) how to keep it from happening again.