Ah yes, just like how free speech means corporations must be allowed to bribe politicians.
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.
Maybe you should have thought of that before you became peasants.
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?
Apparently it also erradicates every major disease
Itll also fix the Israel Palestine conflict.
If you disable the ad blocker, they'll send you some free Iranian yoghurt.
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.
Overcast iOS app comes to mind.
I'm sure there are but I don't have time to go around auditing which ones they are and whitelisting them in my extension and then constantly going back to check if they've been bought out or otherwise decided to become shitheads.
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.
Absolutely. I have no problem displaying a few ads with my content if it results in better content. If it’s done responsibly, which it never is. Instead, it’s always an abusive relationship.
Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.
Wasn't that the whole crux of Citizens United?
CU vs FEC was specifically about campaign financing, but yeah basically ruled that organizations like corporations are protected by 1A, and money counts as free speech.
Which is obviously bullshit on every level, but just one way that a SCOTUS with a few corrupt individuals can destroy democracy for an entire country.
Corporations are people and there should be a jail for them and a gallows.
In reality, no, you're right. Legally though, they are. And we are second class citizens.
I disagree. If you think USA today or any other news outlet shouldn't have free speech then why bother with free speech to begin with.
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.
I don’t think they’re arguing that the ads are part of the free speech, I think they’re arguing the ads are a revenue source that allows them to fund free speech. Blocking ads in this case is more akin to sitting down at the newsstand for two hours while you read the paper, then putting the paper back without having paid for anything. Yes online advertising has become a massive breach of privacy, but they have no obligation to give away their product for free, and looking at ads is how you pay for it.
Free speech ≠ free beer.
"We believe in free speech, so you should let us sell your data."
See, if it's hard to get my data, suddenly it becomes more valuable. These organizations try harder and harder to get to it, and really won't stop. And really, once it's out, it's out.
So I'm just gonna make my data worthless. Fuckin everyone can have it what the hell do I care. I was among the first on Facebook when we had no idea what was happening. Phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, bare ass to the world. It's all out there already, no going back in the tube.
I don't see many ads, so who cares if they have a better idea of what to show me. I don't spend frivolously, and don't buy from websites I don't trust, so what even if I do see some more relevant ads. They're ads. I'm not paying attention anyway.
I'm not giving out answers to security questions and I'm using two factor authentication everywhere. My credit is frozen and I've got all the big stuff bought. I'm not really sure what I have to lose here
Yeah, advertising is not "free speech." It's a way for corporations to steal your life from you, 60 seconds at a time
... They mean that you're supporting free speech by disabling and block and supporting them
Seriously. When did everyone get so stupid? They obviously aren't saying ads are free speech
FREE* speech for everyone
*conditions_apply
Fee speech
free installation, free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free home trial, and free parking. No cash? No problem. No kidding. No muss, no fuss, no risk, no obligation, no red tape, no down payment, no entry fee, no hidden charges, no purchase necessary, no one will call on you, no payments of interest 'til September. But limited time only, though, so act now, order today, send no money. Offer good while supplies last. Two to a customer, each item sold separately, batteries not included, mileage may vary, all sales are final, allow six weeks for delivery. Some items not available, some assembly required, some restrictions may apply.
Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose DSY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself, choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?
George Carlin bit?
Edit: reference
I'll take four!
I miss that man
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".
Alright this just has me wondering which is worse, a wet fuck or a dry one...
Tell me you’ve never fucked without telling me you’ve never fucked….
Ben shapiro????
Lol how insane and out of touch
Hilarious, though this was an onion post
No it wasn't
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
Well no. Freedom to assemble is entirely different from free speech. Both are protected by the First Amendment.
The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects:
- The right to speak, specifically the right to political speech and to be critical of the administration or its officers
- The right to practice religion (right now this is being used to override other rights and duties)
- The right to publish, as per above
- The right to assemble with others
- The right to petition your representatives in office for redress of grievances.
When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was being reviewed for her bench position, she couldn't remember the last one.
But Pepperidge Farm remembers.
They're arguing that the press is important to maintaining and exercising free speech. If they go out of business because they don't make ad money, bad for free speech. Not saying they are right, but I think everyone here is missing what they are really saying.
You're confusing the "concept of free speech" with America's Constitutional protection of free speech (the First Amendment).
This is some peak America-brain to suggest that free speech only exists in the USA. I assure you, outside of America's borders, nobody is referencing the First Amendment when they talk about free speech, and the concept as you so condescendingly claim to be the expert on is not limited to government restriction.
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.
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.
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?
Our ethics dictate we charge the advertisers the highest possible amount so we get more freedom bucks from them
How many lies can you fit in one sentence
We believe in free speech, do you? Give us all your money and send us your nude to prove it.
🤮
Are you using uBlock Origin? I don't get that popup after clicking to a few articles.
I decide what speech is welcome in my home.
Free speech = you must do what we say.
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.
freedom of their speech, not ours
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
Could you point an interested party in the direction where those filters are?
I think they come with ublock itself and are called "annoyance filters" or something like that.
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.
Even though I'm probably not reading it enough to be worth it I pay a yearly online-subscription to one of the newspapers that gained my trust with good investigative pieces in the past.
If everyone was just consuming for free then a newspaper needs to either be heavily funded by a really wealthy person that pays them (and in turn makes it less likely that said newspaper will report against people like that) or the newspaper needs to sell ad-space. So if you are consuming for free AND blocking ads on a website then you are only costing that website money - and in case of newspapers that's not a good thing since it ensures that only those that are publicly funded or funded by billionaires will survive "almost unchanged" while the rest will try to get as populist as possible to the the most amount of clicks to increase their ad-revenue
This is also what nearly killed off local newspapers. It's a huge problem and journalism as a profession is still in the process of adjusting to the new realities.
One of the few sensible people in this thread. Hosting costs big amounts of cash. Paying decent journalists AND EDITORS even more. Their funding has to come from somewhere if you're trying to read news articles for free or using Archive and 9ft lol.
And people talk about reddit being half puns, memes, and pointless THIS comments lol.
They're probably from the "all publicity is good publicity" school of marketing.
Nah. I think they just assumed more people remembered the ad campaign by (if memory serves) The New York Times where they more or less showed every step used to investigate and verify a story before reporting. Also, I would be amazed if that was actually the NYT's campaign which... probably sums things up.
Before they were mismanaged to the shadow realm, Vice was similar. The idea that they very much were "good news" and ACTUAL freedom of speech/the press in contrast to "I want to say all the slurs"
I thought "whitelist" got cancelled for being racist? I distinctly remember being forced to rename everything to "IP Allowlist" and having to rename all my branches to "main" from "master". Jenkins is 3rd party software, so it still has slaves... 😂
It did, and I was also doing that in some of our software in a previous job. Other terms we had to stop using were black sheep, white washing, and even gorilla.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dd3d/we-need-to-stop-saying-blacklist-and-whitelist
How much have you been drinking today, my friend?
Yes?
There is no such thing as being cancelled. Do you think the cancelled police show up at usa today to shut them down for using whitelist?
It's actually the Google corporate police
Just disable JS if you are going to read texts.
Nope because "Javascript not enabled". I would instead recommend some sort of "Anti adblock blocker"
Read as giving them ad revenue allows them to write without doing sponsored articles
painfully true
Thank you, that's also how I understand it.
Still very badly explained I can understand the reaction...
I wonder which content blocker you're using, because with uBlock Origin (with a fairly aggressive config and custom blocklists) I do not get that "disable adblock" pop up.
Not like I'd visit this site at all, I just tried to see if I could create a uBO filter for you to remove the paywall.
Free speech doesn't mean a compelled audience.
Reminds me of Microsoft's "1,000,000 PCs can't be wrong" or whatever it was when they started pushing windows 10 to 7 users
Just because you can say it doesn't mean I have to listen.
wow, the balls of the folk who came up with this 🤡
If you’re trying to get paid based one someone’s views or clicks, it’s not free.
Ummm... That's the wrong freedom for them to be trying to invoke. They have their own. It's called Freedom of the Press. But they don't seem to want to invoke that one when they know it is bullshit.
This might be a mildly infuriating moment
Free speech also entails how willingly you are to put that speech out there. If you want to cover it with a paywall of any sort, you are most welcome to do that. Keep in mind that free speech and its actions also have consequences. If your content is good enough, people might pay to see it. Free market and all that.
Free speech for corporations and advertisers. For users is the paywall as adblocker. For this screenshot, Memes is a better place.
Advertisements are pretty specifically not free.
Literally asking you to pay for free speech jfc
Paid speech!
biggest bullcrap seen until now
It's a false dichotomy to manipulate users, they're so dumb lmao.
On the contrary, I believe free speech gives me the right to JUST SAY NO. Don't give in, you have that right as an individual.
Reminds me of this: https://lemmus.org/comment/1980014
Good Independent journalism requires money. You can't have everything for free you know. If you want to keep your privacy then you should pay for the news sources that you read.
Edit: I'm not american I do not know if USA today is good journalism or not. I am speaking more generally
Run of the mill piece of shit media outlet right there.
They are trying to appeal to "Red" tastes with this one.
If it's free why do you need ads to pay for it?
this one is just dumb lmao
I guess I should've added the /s
Free as in freedom, not beer
Yes I know. Was trying to make a funny.
Free speech = you have to listen to every capitalists crap
Free speech is dead. It's already tainted with hatred, violence and bigotry.
this is literally what righties think free speech mean
