Ah yes, just like how free speech means corporations must be allowed to bribe politicians.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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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?
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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.
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Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.
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 don't think USA today or any other outlet should be protected. I do think the reporters that work there should be protected.
Corporations should be held accountable for what they say or "strongly encourage" others to say. Individuals should be protected if they get things wrong, though.
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
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.
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.
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Injection hackers do not give a single wet fuck about your "safe and ethical advertising practices".
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
Lol how insane and out of touch
"Turn off your ad blocked to prove that you believe in free speech."
This is a hilarious level of argumentation. What's quality of their content?
"Hit yourself in the balls with a mallet to prove how tough you are."
"Step in this pile of dog crap to prove how brave you are."
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Get fucked, USA Today
Yes let’s let corporations dictate our freedoms! Literally nothing bad could ever happen guys!
Lol that's the dumbest thing I've seen in a while.
There is no free speech in news.
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.
Free speech = you must do what we say.
Dark patterns, gotta love em
I decide what speech is welcome in my home.
Oh, so you believe in free speech? Let me scream into your ear for 30 minutes straight then.
I wouldn't visit these sites if you paid me. Much less forced me to watch ads.
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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.
I agree that state sponsored media has pitfalls but I never understood this appeal to “unbiased” media. It doesn’t exist because bias can’t be removed from humans.
I always ask 1 question and ask for 1 example here:
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When did WWII start? If things are objectively true and we expect historical works/statements to lack bias then this should be pretty simple.
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Do you have an example of an objective or unbiased media outlet? A writer? A single article?
This isn’t a dig at you. I just think this is a very broad social issue. Objectivity is a myth. We should recognize biases and account the best we can but “just the facts” reporting just doesn’t exist and never has. People demanding objectivity are often using it as a cudgel in defense of their argument. Take your more vocal folks on the right for instance. They claim “bias” whenever they don’t like something, and “telling it like it is” when it’s “their team.”
Objectivity is a myth.
It's not so much a myth, as an unobtainable goal that should be strived for. Like perfection. One can never be perfect, but one can always be better. There are such things as facts, and accuracy in describing them.
To say objectivity is a myth, seems to suggest nobody has any responsibility to try to accurately represent any facts. If someone claims blue light has a wavelength of 150nm, is that a perfectly valid opinion? Do lies exist?
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Bias will always exist. That is a given
But many outlets have learned to make clear demarcations between editorial and reporting. It isn't always obvious if you aren't looking at it, but it is the idea that actual data is reported "honestly".
For example: Take a look at how most outlets report on the Israel/Palestine war. Some will list IDF casualties for Israel and civillian casualties for Palestine which introduces immense bias (I want to say Al Jazeera does this?). Others will use verbiage like "N Israeli citizens were killed. N*100 Palestinian civilians died" which introduces bias on the other side. A good outlet will use the same verbiage and data for both sides.
And that is immensely useful. Because, again, to harp on that war: There is so much FUD out there that it is REALLY hard to know what is true or not. And sure, social media is a lost cause. But so are a LOT of news outlets and that is why the hospital bombing immediately entered "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" territory.
And no, I am not going to list an "objective or unbiased" outlet. Because that never leads to a good discussion. It always results in "Yeah, well here is an example of them not being perfect. Checkmate" and, more importantly: People who understand the need to care about this should learn how to evaluate for themselves. Rather than rely on some rando on a message board to tell them how to think.
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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
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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?
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Read as giving them ad revenue allows them to write without doing sponsored articles
wow, the balls of the folk who came up with this 🤡
Just because you can say it doesn't mean I have to listen.
Literally asking you to pay for free speech jfc
Paid speech!
This might be a mildly infuriating moment
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