Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Mollie.
1. Vice News tests Facebook’s political transparency tool
After it was revealed that Russian agents had used Facebook to try and rig the 2016 US election, Mark Zuckerberg vowed to ‘make political advertising more transparent’.
So in May, Facebook added a ‘Paid For’ banner to all political ads (or those that Facebook deems “an issue of national importance” – a small but reassuring step in Facebook’s 9-point political integrity strategy.
However, an investigation released this week by Vice News revealed that Facebook’s paid political advertising regulations are not exactly foolproof.
The current affairs channel submitted a series of fake ad requests ‘paid for by’ a bunch of clearly politically-charged sponsors, including all 100 sitting US senators and the Islamic State.
Facebook approved them all.
While Vice News didn’t actually run the approved ads, the fact is Facebook accepted all the US senators (32 of which are currently in re-election races) as appropriate ad sponsors.
What’s more, the ads themselves were exact replicas of the propaganda posted on Facebook by Russia during the 2016 election. And Facebook approved them all stating that the content ‘didn’t violate its policies”.
It begs the question, why are Facebook continuing to flog a model that clearly doesn’t work? Particularly when Zuckerberg claims to be making a loss on political ads during election cycles due to increased moderation costs.
2. You’ll never look at milk in the same way again…
PETA is no stranger to distasteful advertising campaigns – remember its Holocaust on Your Plate campaign which sported taglines such as ‘to animals all people are Nazis’? Or how about last year when the organisation advised us that a dairy-free diet can help autism in children?
Its latest attempt at getting us to #ditchdairy is claiming that drinking cow’s milk is ‘a symbol of white supremacy’.
Cows’ milk has long been a symbol used by white supremacists.
One more reason to #DitchDairy. https://t.co/EcHYpUmBux
— PETA ??? (@peta) October 19, 2018
Unfortunately, in this instance, PETA is somewhat correct…
Research suggests that, statistically, white adults have a higher tolerance of lactose than adults of other ethnicities as their ancestors came from climates where dairy herds could be raised safely and economically, such as central Europe. Fact.
So, to celebrate their genetic superiority, many alt-right groups have been holding rallies at which they get lairy – and topless – and chug a load of milk.
However, using this deranged ideology as the basis of a marketing campaign was not PETA’s finest hour, and consumers were understandably offended:
— Cody Adams (@KidCody1122) October 24