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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I just don't feel comfortable having these big companies profiting from my information. If it's that valuable to them, then they should be paying me for it.
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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?
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
It's because the people who pick and choose what the constitution is to them are the same people who pick and choose parts of The Bible. They believe they're always right and they don't want anyone to ever tell them they're wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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