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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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There is something really dispiriting about the death grip of advertising (or its lack thereof) and the way it is cynically wielded. X would be a prime spot to pump your ads, but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'. Outside of vocal minorities, I absolutely don't believe the average person would care, and would generally be able to discern that the ads hovering around any given tweet have nothing to do with its content - just like I know an ad for Liberty Mutual has nothing to do with the 3-hour RPG retrospective it's interrupting. I've rambled before about this kind of 'fake free market' where companies are claiming their customers are literally begging them to remove a product or cut off a platform, and said company is just respecting their wishes.

If people really can't disassociate the served-up ads from the content they hover around, you would think the healthy thing to do would be to encourage some maturation on this matter instead of indulging these fainting couch sensibilities. But as I said - I dont believe this is really the case. It has nothing to do with people finding offense and everything to do with boxing out political opponents. Even normal people I know who support the ad bocott against X eventually give this away, but still suggest nothing fucky is happening.

but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'.

Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV? It doesn't matter if most people found it funny or harmless. Enough went the other way that it has its own wikipedia page.

I think all that happened is that the internet became TV. For a lot of us, it was an irreverent place and you just dealt with nerds twisting any public poll to reference Hitler or rampant misogyny (playful or not). But things moved from self-contained forums to much larger social media sites that functioned more like broadcast TV. A lot of normies would be fine living by early video game chat rules too. But for enough people Nazi jokes are right out. So it became safe and companies became risk averse.

The media absolutely does exploit this to try to cause things like an advertiser exodus from Twitter , but it seems almost inevitable.

Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV?

Nobody avoided buying products advertised at said Superbowl as a result.

Yes, but there was appropriate ass-covering.

Musk is significantly more defiant.

Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV?

Yes, Super Bowl ad sales just kept increasing every year. Advertisers are boycotting Twitter because they are fighting a political war against Elon Musk, not because of anything being posted n Twitter.

Yeah, I don't believe the whole "they're just doing it because they're afraid it will hurt their profit" thing either. I've never seen actually go out and back it with evidence, and the whole idea makes as much sense to me as insisting that all organisms are trying to survive because "muh natural selection" even as you're staring at the corpse of someone who committed suicide.

"All organisms are generally trying to survive because muh natural selection, and Suicide Georg is an outlier who does not make a significant impact on the survival of the species and should not be counted (and indeed isn't)" makes enough sense to me. Are you denying the existence of natural selection itself, or just the notion that it applies in 100% of the cases to 100% of organisms?

The latter. Also that behaviors that do not result in immediate death are not immediately selected for, and it is therefore wrong to look at the through them lens of survival.

You're right that the public don't care, but journalists desperate for scandal will write articles are how shocked, shocked they are that an insurance company advert is appearing next to an ISIS beheading video or whatever. Those articles are what the companies react to. My guess is that in the risk-averse world of marketing/PR, it's safer to pull ads than run them and risk your boss yelling at you because his press summary included a few articles like that.

Absolutely that's a part of it. However, when it comes to a company like Disney I think it's just pure flex.

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