Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #AdObservatory
Most recents (5)
Google's search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google assures us that they're working on it, though the most visible effort is replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a confident habitual liar chatbot:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/twe…
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pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/twe…
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/pai…
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pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/pai…
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The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences at enormous scale.
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Facebook just escalated its war on NYU's #AdObserver project, a project that monitors and discloses Facebook's failure to live up to its promise to block paid disinformation.
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Here's how that works. Facebook users volunteer to download and install Ad Observer, a browser plugin. This plugin scrapes the ads Facebook shows that user. They are cleaned of any personally identifying information and uploaded to the #AdObservatory.
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The Observatory is an archive that accountability journalists and researchers can mine to see whether FB is keeping its promises to label political ads and block paid disinformation. It's proof that FB does NOT live up to these promises.
pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sov…
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pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sov…
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Facebook has just entered antitrust hell, as nearly every US state and the federal government have taken the giant company to court, asserting that the company used predatory acquisitions to achieve its monopoly.
pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/bor…
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pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/bor…
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But while we definitely need to pay close attention to the company's acquisitions, it's also worthwhile to look at the parts of its business it outsources - parts of the business that are key the safety of its users and its compliance with the law.
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A new, engrossing, lengthy @BuzzFeed article by @CraigSilverman lays out a detailed case that Facebook systematically profits from disinformation: financial fraud, identity theft, dangerous scam products, and political disinformation.
buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
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buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
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Today, @WIRED ran my op-ed about @Facebook's war on #AdObservatory, an @nyuniversity project that enlists users to gather the ads FB serves so researchers and accountability journalists can measure how FB is living up to its promises on paid disinfo.
wired.com/story/facebook…
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wired.com/story/facebook…
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Facebook is really bad at keeping its promises. At a moment in which paid disinformation on social media threatens the integrity of US elections and the credibility of US democracy, FB threatened to destroy a watchdog that documents FB's failures to live up to its promises.
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FB is waging a two-front war on the scrappy academics who run this project: first, there are the legal threats (which depend on very shaky legal ground), and then there's a disinformation campaign that smears these academics and their work.
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#AdObservatory is an NYU project that enlists Facebook users to record the ads they see, building a database of the ads Facebook runs and to check whether Facebook is adhering to its own policies, for example, on labeling and limiting political ads
adobservatory.org
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adobservatory.org
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The project has been extensively used by journalists and transparency activists to hold Facebook to account for failing to live up to its own standards. It relies on a browser plugin that Facebook users choose to install to help with the transparency effort.
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Facebook's dismal track record on advertising, combined with the urgent concerns about disinformation in paid political advertising in the runup to the 2020 election, are cause for alarm.
The company, however, sees it as cause for a legal threat.
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The company, however, sees it as cause for a legal threat.
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