this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Don’t all social media and internet companies do that? It’s all a case of machine learning. I can’t open Insta these days without being blasted with reels of boobs, cleavage etc. My wife gets reels of cooking, dancing etc. It doesn’t have to do anything with our searches or viewing. They’re using our personal information to create a model and shoving targeted content based on that down our throats. This has the highest probability of increasing engagement on their platform.
Meta purposely pits extreme sides of every issue you could think of, gender, race, class, religion, even vegan, against each other. Every hate comment is great news for Meta. Hate comments mean that person is engaging so they will feed them more of that content and further drag them into their hateful beliefs. And why do they do that? To show them shirt and knicknack advertisements while they're frothing at the mouth.
Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. He's one of the worst humans on the planet and deserves terrible things to happen to him.
No, it's not normal. Almost no internet companies around the world try to do anything similar to what Meta did and does. Even if you focus on social media companies, I believe that only a small minority try to do that kind of thing.
For example, here we are on social media. Do you see any targeted advertising? Is it being done by the Lemmy instance? And how many instances are there? Then we could look at Mastodon, or discussion forums, or comment boards, or you name it. Of course you would expect some targeted advertising, like you might find computer advertisements if you're on a computer tech forum, but that's different from targeting users who are in a weak state of mind, precisely because it's targeting their overtly expressed general interests and not their temporary vulnerabilities.
Finally, I think you should go back and read the article. You ranted about companies trying to shove things down your throats, but the article was about how to misuse targeted advertising.
Lemmy is far from normal, it is not profitable as a social media platform and is reliant on donations and generosity.
Google AdSense does similar things to meta, as does amazon. This is far from a misuse, of the technology as that implies that this isn't accomplishing the intended goal, which, aside from laws trying to differentiate children from adults, it does.
Yeah, sorry, but while still going too far, these companies get dwarved by meta when it comes to these practices. I work with certain advertising platforms and know it inside out (don't judge me lol). No way can we target based on emotional state or anything even closely resmlembling that.
Neither google (at least for the first decade or so) or Amazon have such detailed data about you as facebook
I'm convinced insta knows your a guy and will blast you with reels full of chicks no matter what you do.
Yeah, it’s impossible to escape the thottening. Same with snap
But emotional state?
I can't speak to "emotional state", but the thottening is a real thing (I've spent weeks trying to stop having all these ass models from cluttering up my feed, it's impossible)
Worth noting by the way that instagram is owned by Meta - the very company the post is calling out.
Well sure, but it is more than that. Advertising ,broadly, is literally there expressly to manipulate your emotional state. Social media just gives them more info about your state so they are much more effective at it.