The ‘Brand Safety’ and ‘Suitability’ industries have financially crushed the news business by keeping ads away from articles that its ‘sentiment analysis’ algorithms think will make people sad or upset.
This is pure cope from the talentless cretins who ran jezebel (into the ground, all by themselves).
They had not produced any meaningful journalism for several years. But sure, their downfall was caused by the secret conspiratorial algorithm that took ad money away.
So Cory Doctorow - y’know, the guy who created the term “enshittification,” is also just “coping,” eh?
There’s a bigger issue here than just a site you don’t think has value shutting down.
So Cory Doctorow - y’know, the guy who created the term “enshittification,” is also just “coping,” eh?
Yes. Half that post is whining about conservatives and the other half is just repeating the content from the 404media article, without adding any additional value.
There’s a bigger issue here than just a site you don’t think has value shutting down.
When your business model revolves around ad money, you toe the line or die. It has always been this way.
Jezebel died because it had no readers, not because its content was so upsetting to The Man that they were demonetized. We’re just hearing the pearl-clutching righteous indignation of people too proud to accept that they lost because they suck.
No. I don’t think any of these points are made in the 404media article:
Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don’t violate the First Amendment:
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(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):
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The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn’t brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn’t brand safe. If you’re in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.Holy shit I don’t even know where to start with the massive list of strawman arguments put forth in this article.
It decries “woke capitalism”. LolWtf is woke capitalism?
The first amendment statement is just simply… wrong.
The idea that the problem with social media is really that people aren’t allowed to just say anything without limitations is outright wacky.
Yes let’s just end terms of service…says this guy apparently.
These people are dangerously clueless.
Wtf is woke capitalism?
A term Republicans use when portraying themselves as victims of a conspiracy among corporations to censor their views and arguments. It is used in a similar manner as “the liberal media.”
Did you read the article?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/
Which brings me to “woke capitalism.” Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn’t to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it’s to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy’s agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees “to own the libs?”
The first amendment statement is just simply… wrong.
That is not terribly convincing.
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It did not.
Jezebel was awful and deserved to be shut down a long time ago.
Christ, who the shit cares. It was a garbage site anyways.
That’s a new one to me, I’ve never heard of sentiment analysis. This makes sense, they want control of your emotions and the ones that help their products. I bet they focus just on negging and jealousy inducing things. Sad and upset doesn’t sell shit.
Sentiment analysis is basic data mining.
Get access to an API and scan the tweets / posts / whatever and look for key words. Hate, dumb, wtf, love, awesome, etc. You can get 60-80% accuracy just counting the number of words that express a sentiment. Literally that simple, just count positive and negative words/phrases. Across a large dataset you can get a decent idea what people think, and there are easy ways to dig deeper.
And that was the half-assed quick approach, folks who know Markov chains and LLMs could do far, far deeper analysis.
Our world is breaking and we don’t know how to fix it, but we can guess pretty accurately how people feel about it. Turn AI onto fixing our problems people who make the robots.
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*Shitty site dies*
“THE ILLUMINATI DID IT!”
To people saying Jezebel deserves its failure: what do you read that’s so good?
Not the trash of Jazebel for sure.
