Evil stuff on the Internet and following the money

05 June 2018

Rule number one of dealing with the big Internet companies is: never complain to them about all the evil stuff they support. It's a waste of time and carpal tunnels. All of the major Internet companies have software, processes, and, most important, contract moderators, to attenuate complaints. After all, if Big Company employees came in to work and saw real user screenshots of the beheading videos, or the child abuse channel, or the ethnic cleansing memes, then that would harsh their mellow and severely interfere with their ability to, as they say in California, bro down and crush code.

Fortunately, we have better options than engaging with a process that's designed to mute a complaint. Follow the money.

Your average Internet ad does not come from some ominous all-seeing data-driven Panopticon. It's probably placed by some marketing person looking at an ad dashboard screen that's just as confusing to them as the ad placement is confusing to you.

So I'm borrowing the technique that "Spocko" started for talk radio, and Sleeping Giants scaled up for ads on extremist sites.

• Contact a brand's marketing decision makers directly.

• Briefly make a specific request.

• Put your request in terms that make not granting it riskier and more time-consuming.

This should be pretty well known by now. What's new is a change in European privacy regulations. The famous European GDPR applies not just to Europeans, but to natural persons. So I'm going to test the idea that if I ask for something specific and easy to do, it will be easier for people to just do it, instead of having to figure out that (1) they have a different policy for people who they won't honor GDPR requests from and (2) they can safely assign me to the non-GDPR group and ignore me.

My simple request is not to include me in a Facebook Custom Audience. I can find the brands that are doing this by downloading ad data from Facebook, and here's a letter-making web thingy that I can use. Try it if you like. I'll follow up with how it's going.