Ah yes, just like how free speech means corporations must be allowed to bribe politicians.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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But they're people! Well, only in that one instance and not in any others that would allow punishments levied against people to be applied to businesses.
Like, if I sold poison that killed millions of people every year, I'd get the death penalty.
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Didn't you know? Disabling ad blockers ensures free speech and apparently may also peacefully end the current crisis in the middle east... oh, did I mention it helps with world hunger too?
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We are dedicated to safe and ethical advertising practices
Mates, that ship has long sailed
There are ethical ad services, but I've never seen outside of one random blog site.
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What gets me about them (and any other sites really) saying that is there are safer ways in showing ads and that’s just hosting them from their domain instead of selling page space to random ad buyers.
Guess that’s too much trouble and not enough profit for these corporations.
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Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.
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I allow USA Today to speak freely, including speaking their ad frames and images.
But that doesn’t mean I’m compelled to listen to everything they say.
USA Today: speech isn’t free if I’m forced to listen to it.
Well you're not forced. You don't actually have to go to their website at all.
They seem to be making the argument that if you want some of their content, you have to accept all of it (ads included). Of course, that's absurd. I can pick up a printed newspaper (if those still exist) and skip right to the comics if I want, and bypass the sports and classifieds entirely if I wish. I can pick up a book or album and only enjoy a single chapter or track. You get the idea.
While I agree with you in principle, I'm not sure the newspaper example supports your position, although it is an apt analogy.
I would imagine that the counter argument would take the form of something like, "Yes, you don't have to read the whole paper, but you can't just buy the comics. You buy the whole paper, get access to the whole thing, and the ads come with it. Similarly, with our web presence, in order to access everything, whether you choose to consume it all or not, the ads must come as a part of it."
Personally, I don't fully agree with either that argument or yours, can see the merits and flaws of both, and fall somewhere in the middle.
I'd argue that while they're within their rights to create, distribute, bundle, and price their content as they see fit, just like the current debate with social media companies, your monitor is your own personal, privately owned platform, and you shouldn't/can't be forced to offer a platform to any content you don't wish to publish (to your audience of one). So you're perfectly within your rights to want and attempt to only view the content you wish to see, while they're also perfectly within their rights to want and attempt to package their content in such a way that links their articles with the advertisements of their sponsors.
So at that point, it's just an arms race between the producer doing their best to force ads onto screens and consumers doing their best to avoid same. Neither side is morally right or wrong, and while there likely is a middle ground that wild be acceptable to both parties, there's zero good faith between the two sides which would be necessary to establish that middle ground.
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Yeah, advertising is not "free speech." It's a way for corporations to steal your life from you, 60 seconds at a time
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Whether or not USA Today believes in free speech, its sponsors to not. They expect brand safe conduct.
Also USA Today's upper management has opinions on what they would publish. You won't see pro-anarchist op-eds in USA Today.
That said, news agencies are less good for getting news rather used in conjunction with others to confirm their veracity.
Injection hackers do not give a single wet fuck about your "safe and ethical advertising practices".
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Lol how insane and out of touch
If garbage had a face.
why does nobody know what the concept of free speech actually is? it literally means congress will make no law restricting your right to assemble or speak as long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights to do the same
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Get fucked, USA Today
I've felt that way for a long time. It's nice to see someone else say it.
award winning content
sure jan.
Don't use your freedom of choice, it hurts our bank accounts and bonuses 😭😭 - board member.
What's "safe and ethical advertising practices"? Is it like pacifist inclusive Nazism?
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PROVE YOUR FUCKING PATRIOTISM AND GIVE UP YOUR PRIVACY FOR [INSERT_COMMON_LOOTCRATE_ITEM]
If you don't look at ads on USA Today's website, YOU HATE AMERICA.
We believe in free speech, do you? Give us all your money and send us your nude to prove it.
How many lies can you fit in one sentence
🤮
"Turn off your ad blocked to prove that you believe in free speech."
This is a hilarious level of argumentation. What's quality of their content?
"Hit yourself in the balls with a mallet to prove how tough you are."
"Step in this pile of dog crap to prove how brave you are."
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Are you using uBlock Origin? I don't get that popup after clicking to a few articles.
Free speech = you must do what we say.
I decide what speech is welcome in my home.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to be forced to consume something (including ads). Freedom of speech includes not sending all of my metadata to you and your business partners.
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Yes let’s let corporations dictate our freedoms! Literally nothing bad could ever happen guys!
Just use the right ublock filter to get past these silly anti adblocks
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Lol that's the dumbest thing I've seen in a while.
There is no free speech in news.
Your ads are award-winning?!?
Oh, so you believe in free speech? Let me scream into your ear for 30 minutes straight then.
Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).
But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.
The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.
Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer "good" companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and...
In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and "clickbait" articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.
So it is very much worth looking in to more permissive blocklists and even permitlists. Block tracking cookies because fuck that shit. But permit sites that you "trust" to have reasonable ads and look in to finer grain blocklists that still allow the actual ads to be displayed, even if they aren't the ones based on Amazon figuring out you have a foot fetish.
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