17 Jul 2017

Playing for third place

Just tried a Twitter advertising trick that a guy who goes by “weev” posted two years ago.

It still works.

They didn’t fix it.

Any low-budget troll who can read that old blog post and come up with a valid credit card number can still do it.

Maybe Twitter is a bad example, but the fast-moving nationalist right wing manages to outclass its opponents on other social marketing platforms, too. Facebook won’t even reveal how badly they got played in 2016. They thought they were putting out cat food for cute Internet kittens, but the rats ate it.

This is not new. Right-wing shitlords, at least the best of them, are the masters of database marketing. They absolutely kill it, and they have been ever since Marketing as we know it became a thing. Some good examples:

All the creepy surveillance marketing stuff they’re doing today is just another set of tools in an expanding core competency.

Every once in a while you get an exception. The environmental movement became a direct mail operation in response to Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who alarmed environmentalists enough that organizations could reliably fundraise with direct mail copy quoting from Watt’s latest speech. And the Democrats tried that “Organizing for America” thing for a little while, but, man, their heart just wasn’t in it. They dropped it like a Moodle site during summer vacation. Somehow, the creepier the marketing, the more it skews “red”. The more creativity involved, the more it skews “blue” (using the USA meanings of those colors.) When we make decisions about how much user surveillance we’re going to allow on a platform, we’re making a political decision.

Anyway. News Outlets to Seek Bargaining Rights Against Google and Facebook.

The standings so far.

  1. Shitlords and fraud hackers

  2. Adtech and social media bros

  3. NEWS SITES HERE (?)

News sites want to go to Congress, to get permission to play for third place in their own business? You want permission to bring fewer resources and less experience to a surveillance marketing game that the Internet companies are already losing?

We know the qualities of a medium that you win by being creepier, and we know the qualities of a medium that you can win with reputation and creativity. Why waste time and money asking Congress for the opportunity to lose, when you could change the game instead?

Maybe achieving balance in political views depends on achieving balance in business model. Instead of buying in to the surveillance marketing model 100%, and handing an advantage to one side, maybe news sites should help users control what data they share in order to balance competing political interests.

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