[HN Gopher] Instagram ads Facebook won't show you (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
Instagram ads Facebook won't show you (2021)
Author : nixcraft
Score : 309 points
Date : 2022-12-07 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (signal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (signal.org)
| Oras wrote:
| I don't know how this is new in any way.
|
| This ad [0] was created 6 years ago showing more than the ads in
| the article.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrjT8m0hcKU
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I wrote a generator for these if you want to make your own.
|
| https://tacix.at/experiments/signal
| saaaam wrote:
| I did something similar, years ago, for twitter ads, using
| autogenerated videos. They didn't block me, although not sure it
| would work today:
|
| https://thenewinquiry.com/taxonomy-of-humans-according-to-tw...
| jsnell wrote:
| (2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Instagram ads Facebook won 't show you_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040470 - May 2021 (177
| comments)
| nixcraft wrote:
| Context: from Twitter[0] - "When we made Instagram ads to show
| you just how you got targeted, we got our ad account disabled.
| But now Facebook is putting it right out there ~
| https://facebook.com/ads/about/ "
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1600559887742009345
| guywithahat wrote:
| I've always had trouble with this publicity stunt. Like banning
| people for baseless political or personal reasons is bad, but
| this is directly insulting Instagram. In effect it's saying
| "here's the information Instagram has collected on you, now use
| our platform which doesn't collect this information". Like why
| would Meta take that reputational hit for a few thousand dollars
| in the short term. It's a bad deal for them and it makes sense to
| not do it
| twelvedogs wrote:
| the fact that anyone who is that terrible would logically not
| want you to know that they're terrible doesn't really change
| the terribleness just points out that they're aware of how
| terrible they are.
| jimkoen wrote:
| I don't get it, how is revealing the truth about somethning
| insulting all of a sudden? The displayed ads don't judge,
| they're shock value is generated solely by what they reveal
| about instagrams business practices.
|
| It's obviously not in Metas best interest to be open about
| their data collection practices, but that's the entire point of
| this campaign, that Meta/Facebook/Instagram can only exist with
| intransparency.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| How unethical does an action have to be before this
| rationalization no longer stands?
| blitzar wrote:
| The thing is I did see the ads, lots of times ... but it go
| nothing correct, and really blunted the whole impact.
| dymk wrote:
| Note that the entity running the ads, in this case Signal, still
| has no way to identify _who_ was shown the ad. Only Facebook
| knows that.
| eterm wrote:
| Are campaign IDs not a thing for anyone who clicks through? Or
| simply have a different landing page for each campaign?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| These ads intentionally identify the parameters but the point
| they're making is that you can show these extremely targeted
| ads and put a lucrative offer that requires entering
| email/name/phone and voila you'd have unmasked the user.
| dymk wrote:
| This kind of seems like saying 'All a burglar has to do is
| break into the house and they can set up surveillance in
| your house'. Yeah sure, that's technically true, but if
| they're in your house, they can already do far worse.
|
| If somebody is willing to go to some scam website and enter
| arbitrary PII, they've already been compromised, regardless
| of Facebook's involvement.
| user3939382 wrote:
| More like someone can break into the place storing your
| things that have already been stolen from you.
|
| We don't want advertisers unmasking us but Facebook
| shouldn't have this data in the first place.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I always feel like I'm the weird one out. The best thing would be
| no ads. But the second best thing would be hyper-targeted ads
| because the most annoying thing is ads that are irrelevant to me.
|
| When I watch broadcast TV, I hate seeing ads for mattresses, kids
| toys, menopause medication, home appliances.
|
| I want to see ads for camera lenses and cool sneakers.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| I disagree 100% that hyper-targeted ads are second best to no
| ads.
|
| For me, it's:
|
| 1) No ads
|
| 2) No ads
|
| 3) No ads
|
| I accomplish this via a bevy of ad blockers, VPN, and custom
| DNS settings
| flappyeagle wrote:
| so do I. no ads is best. but some ads are native to the
| medium and unavoidable
| budoso wrote:
| I'd tend to agree. Except for the fact that to create good
| targeted ads it takes tracking my every click and move. And
| that this can be sold to parties that I've never interacted
| with nor (actively) consented to having my information.
| johnm212 wrote:
| It looks like facebook disputed this story
|
| > Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, responded on Twitter on
| Wednesday saying the screenshots are from early March "when the
| ad account was briefly disabled for a few days due to an
| unrelated payments issue."
|
| > Osborne added: "The ads themselves were never rejected as they
| were never set by Signal to run. The ad account has been
| available since early March, and the ads that don't violate our
| policies could have run since then."
|
| This is from: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-
| signal-are-figh...
|
| Either way, it's a great publicity stunt by Signal.
| latchkey wrote:
| Oh right, we should definitely expect to see more ads like this
| then... uh huh.
| pflenker wrote:
| You can at the same time be against the ads and against
| misleading publicity stunts.
| latchkey wrote:
| It isn't misleading though. It is exposing what really
| happens under the covers.
|
| They didn't have to run the ads or even be truthful about
| being blocked. Fact is, they would have been blocked and
| the ads are indeed targeted. All of the details in those
| ads, are true.
|
| Even if FB doesn't collect the data itself, any time you
| shop online, you get added to buckets and those buckets get
| shared when the seller uploads the target data back to FB
| and then the process starts all over again.
| diogenes-pithos wrote:
| Why are you accepting Facebook's PR narrative as true?
|
| From the article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-
| and-signal-are-figh...):
|
| > Signal countered on Twitter that it "absolutely did" try
| to run the ads. "The ads were rejected, and Facebook
| disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as
| Facebook should know."
|
| I'm not saying Signal's side is necessarily true, but
| you're making an affirmative claim that Signal is
| performing a "misleading publicity stunt", by taking faith
| on Facebook's narrative as true.
|
| *edit: posted the wrong link
| Mistletoe wrote:
| History has shown me to expect that Facebook PR is
| actually more likely to be untrue than true.
|
| But that started at the top.
|
| https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-
| fac...
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Interestingly, there are a lot of ads that are like this...
| just subtler.
|
| If you've ever seen tee shirts and similar products in ads
| that say things like "This Kansas City redhead likes their
| coffee with whiskey" or some other uncanny specific junk,
| thats how this works.
|
| There is a whole new category of products based around these
| ads. I don't know what they're actually called actually, but
| it was on HN sometime in the last year. They're usually tee-
| shirts and other "made on demand" products, and they use the
| magic of software to generate images for the ads, and
| products that produce to a ton of permutations, and target ad
| demographics that fit all of description. The products aren't
| real until someone clicks the link, and then software knows
| which ad you clicked and generates it for that permutation.
|
| The whole idea that the un-canny match will be enough to
| attract buyers for the novelty, and they eschew the inventory
| risk by just printing on demand.
| latchkey wrote:
| I've got a bit of experience in this area.
|
| I built an ad engine for Kink.com (NSFW) which had ads
| placed on even higher traffic sites like PH. I built the
| original pixel tracker for Marin Software, and @stickfigure
| and I built GearLaunch, which was the backend that sold
| those t-shirts you're talking about.
|
| Needless to say, you don't see as many t-shirt ads any more
| because FB cracked down on it... not because of the
| targeted ads, but because it became a copyright
| infringement game and it was easy to block the people
| creating the ads (and shirts) as they were all outside of
| the US (ie: Vietnam). That and thankfully FB didn't want
| their wall to be all ads for t-shirts, lol.
| choppaface wrote:
| "the ads that don't violate our policies"
|
| They would have denied the ads anyways. The cited FB spox is
| news not for adding facts but rather for its laden
| speciousness.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Are we really at the level of hate for Facebook/Meta where
| people are justifying just making stuff up about them?
|
| "The accusations are untrue, but I think they would have been
| true, so that's basically the same thing."
|
| Complain about these ads being banned when it actually
| happens, not when Signal lies about it because you think
| that's what Facebook would have done.
| diogenes-pithos wrote:
| Why do you believe Signal is lying about it, and Facebook
| is not?
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| If Facebook was lying here, you'd think Signal would
| speak up about it. It would be a HUGE PR win for them, I
| can already imagine the headlines ("Facebook denied their
| ads, banned their account, and then lied to cover it
| up"). It would be extremely easy for them to provide a
| screenshot of an email from Facebook or similar saying
| the ad was declined, so why don't they?
|
| Secondly, while I'm no fan of Meta/Facebook (and think
| they're a net negative for the world), I trust them way
| more than Signal to get basic facts right in their
| statement. Facebook is a massive corporation with lawyers
| and PR people who know that outright lying about
| something like this is a horrible and possibly illegal
| idea.
|
| It seems pretty obvious to me here that Signal expected
| Facebook not to comment on this and for them to net a
| juicy PR win. On the other hand, Facebook has no reason
| to believe Signal would stay quiet after being accused of
| lying if they had a shred of evidence to the contrary.
| Unfortunately Signal achieved their goal anyways, because
| we still have people like choppaface coming out of the
| woodwork to defend them because "Facebook would have done
| it anyways".
| skeaker wrote:
| Signal did speak up about it, and flatly denied
| Facebook's statement.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Signal provided no new evidence of this claim, and the
| existing evidence they did provide seems to support
| Facebook's side of the story (as I explained more here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33900582).
|
| I just don't see the motivation for Signal to hold back
| this evidence if what they're saying is true. It would be
| so easy for them to go and screenshot an email or page
| saying "this ad is rejected" - why don't they? The only
| way it makes sense is that they don't have this evidence,
| because they're lying.
| diogenes-pithos wrote:
| They did speak out about it, which is in the same article
| linked above that sources the FB disputation statement
| (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-
| figh...):
|
| > We absolutely did try to run these. The ads were
| rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are
| real screenshots, as Facebook should know.
|
| I don't think your logic about companies lying really
| tracks with the historical record. Companies, when they
| believe they can get away with it, lie all the time.
|
| Again, I'm not saying that one organization was certainly
| lying or not-lying; I'm just challenging your
| presupposition that Signal was lying.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Copy pasting what I sent in another response:
|
| Signal provided no new evidence of this claim, and the
| existing evidence they did provide seems to support
| Facebook's side of the story (as I explained more here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33900582).
|
| I just don't see the motivation for Signal to hold back
| this evidence if what they're saying is true. It would be
| so easy for them to go and screenshot an email or page
| saying "this ad is rejected" - why don't they? The only
| way it makes sense is that they don't have this evidence,
| because they're lying.
|
| > I'm just challenging your presupposition that Signal
| was lying.
|
| I'm not presupposing anything, I'm looking at the
| available evidence and the actions of the actors involved
| and coming to a conclusion. If anything, I hate
| Meta/Facebook, I think they are a net negative to the
| world, and I probably came into this with a mental bias
| against them.
| diogenes-pithos wrote:
| I think it'd be helpful for discussion to include Signal's
| dispute of Facebook's disputation of the story in your comment:
|
| > We absolutely did try to run these. The ads were rejected,
| and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real
| screenshots, as Facebook should know.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Are there other screenshots I'm not aware of that weren't
| posted on the Signal blog (as their response uses the
| plural)?
|
| The only screenshot I can find shows a disabled account (not
| any rejected ads), and also seems to support Facebook's side
| of the story (you can see a banner in the background saying
| something about their "current balance", which would imply
| what Facebook said was true).
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Facebook admits that they would have rejected a couple of
| the ads. See the grand-parents link.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Facebook claims it would have rejected ads that "assert
| that you have a specific medical condition or sexual
| orientation", which seems like a fair/reasonable policy
| to me, and accepted the others.
| [deleted]
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Even though this is old news, I'm curious to know if any of those
| "attributes" were embellished. I've run FB ads myself and wasn't
| ever able to find that granular of targeting without deeper
| relationships, like admin access, with other pages - looks like
| groups required that if I'm correct?
| lm28469 wrote:
| I've worked at a company which ran a looot of ads on fb and it
| was definitely this granular, it was an eye opener for me
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| Yikes.
| gedy wrote:
| I'm curious if it was effective and worth the trouble?
|
| As a consumer, I don't click on ads at all, I don't watch
| video ads, and basically don't impulse buy anything.
|
| And working with companies over the years, our marketing
| departments didn't really know how or why to do this level of
| targeting.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I'm curious if it was effective
|
| I don't think it is, it's mostly bot traffic anyways...
|
| > and worth the trouble?
|
| ...but companies are paying $$$ for it and it's very easy
| to setup/run their campaigns and give them the "engagement"
| reports they ask for. I think everybody with half a brain
| understands it's a big game of moving money with very
| little real world/real people engagement
| kennywinker wrote:
| These ads follows along in the proud tradition of banned ads that
| were designed to be banned from the onset because saying "we got
| banned" is useful for positioning yourself as dangerous to the
| establishment.
| worik wrote:
| That is untrue.
|
| If Facebook were not shy about their algorithmic approach there
| would be nothing wrong with these ads.
|
| Not so much "...ads that were designed to be banned..." but ads
| designed to test an hypothesis.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > but ads designed to test an hypothesis.
|
| I guess I don't really agree. The goal of an ad is to get new
| customers, not test hypotheses. If it was designed to test
| where the edges are, they wouldn't be blogging about it. I
| believe they tested the edges so they could find something
| that crossed the line, and then get publicity for being
| banned. But that's a question of intent, so who knows. Maybe
| they really thought this would be an awesome campaign, and
| are making lemonaid out of it getting banned.
| thayne wrote:
| Or it's possible that it was a hedged bet. If the ads were
| run, they would have an ad campaign that showed how much
| Facebook knows about you, if they were blocked, the would
| be able to write this blog post.
| shredprez wrote:
| Meta: I'm familiar with "an historic", but I've never seen
| "an hypothesis" before. Is "an before h-" a broader
| grammatical pattern than I realized?
| [deleted]
| izzydata wrote:
| The only example I had previously ever heard of was "an
| hour" because the H isn't pronounced. As far as I've ever
| heard it spoken the H in both hypothesis and historical are
| well pronounced so "an hypothesis" sounds jarringly
| incorrect to me.
| lionkor wrote:
| My guess would be people who primarily write, not speak,
| English. 'h' is a consonant after all, the fact that its
| like that here may not be apparent to people who write more
| than they speak English (as a second/third language)
| kraftman wrote:
| The 'n' is really to help the flow as you are talking, so
| it depends on if you pronounce the 'h' or not. In british
| english you would nont say 'an historical' or 'an
| hyphothesis' since both are pronounced with the 'h'.
| hammock wrote:
| Yes
|
| >In English, the pronunciation of <h> as /h/ can be
| analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme
| /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless
| version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word <hit>
| , /hIt/ is realized as [IIt]
|
| For words beginning with h and where the first syllable is
| unstressed (historic, hypothesis, but not hitter, happy) it
| can be appropriate to use "an" rather than "a" as the
| associated indefinite article.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| All the words in this thread are coming from Ancient
| Greek (hypnosis, history, homo, hoplite, hero etc). In
| Ancient Greek these words don't start with an h (upnose,
| istoria, omo, oplites, eroas etc).
|
| In Ancient Greek polytonic orthography, vowels can have
| one of two diacritic marks: oxeia and daseia. The second
| one is used to denote the /h/ sound (rough breathing).
| Words starting with vowels with this mark in their
| translation to English added the H before the vowel to
| denote this sound because of the lack of diacritic
| marks/accents
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing
| kennywinker wrote:
| Isn't this an american english vs british english thing?
| I was puzzled by "an historic" for a long time and then I
| heard a british person say it and it made sense. Because
| personally I pronounce the h in historic, hypothesis,
| hitter, and happy virtually identically.
| kelnos wrote:
| Native American English speaker here (from northeast/mid-
| Atlantic, but living in NorCal for 20 years now), and I
| generally _mostly_ drop the "h" in "historic", such that
| "an" sounds reasonable. Agree that dropping the "h" from
| the other words you mention would feel weird, though.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I'm in the PNW, so a fairly different accent. If I say
| "an historic" the h gets minimized, but "a historic"
| sounds perfectly natural to my ear and "an" sounds wrong
| with all the other example words.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Mid-Atlantic here. I'd say "a historic" with the harder
| 'h' sound.
|
| "an historic" sounds to me like "anhistoric" (as in
| "lacking history" kind of like "amoral")
| hammock wrote:
| The word is "ahistoric," and ask yourself why you thought
| it was "anhistoric"... it's related to the reason why
| some say "an historic." ;)
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ahistoric
| jjgreen wrote:
| Native BE speaker here, I've seen and heard "an historic"
| (like ahnistoric) from posher BE speakers than me, but
| never "an hypothesis" (ahnypothesis?) from whichever
| social class ... possibly I hang around with the wrong
| crowd?
| jtvjan wrote:
| Yes, you have been hanging out with the wrong crowd:
| https://youtu.be/BZLFIRkPmcE
| hammock wrote:
| An reason to adore that man. Great video
| Pfiffer wrote:
| Anecdata point of one, but I voice the H on hypothesis.
| Im a native American English speaker, but from the
| northwest.
| hammock wrote:
| "Voiceless" in this context means you dont engage your
| larnyx/vocal cords (you don't create a pitch), not that
| you don't sound it out. Compare a whispered "ahhh" -
| voiceless - vs the "ahh" you say at the doctor - voiced.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Which doesn't exactly invalidate them.
|
| Sometimes manifestly unjust laws are challenged via an index
| violation of the law with the specific goal of getting the law
| thrown out.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Sure, totally. I wasn't suggesting it's invalid, just that
| sometimes "we got banned, oh no!" was the plan all along.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My mistake for misinterpreting. I agree!
| hadjian wrote:
| I might come off a bit naive, but I didn't picture the data
| collection being _this_ precise.
|
| Now I'm interested in my own data. Are those companies required
| to offer a means to download your own data?
|
| Did anyone do that and if so, was it readable?
| [deleted]
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