Ads watchdog files FTC complaint against X, formerly Twitter, over unlabeled ads | TechCrunch

Comments

• Knusper@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I thoroughly enjoy that it’s still “X, formerly Twitter”. I’ve seen other news sites just give up completely and continue referring to it as “Twitter”. “X” is just really bad at being a name, because it always sounds like you’re talking about some unknown thing, like “XYZ”.

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  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe it’ll be a full Prince situation eventually.

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    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Prince was doing it to deliberately obfuscate press coverage to fuck up the publishers. That’s why this is a dumb decision for Twitter because it hurts the brand when you’re supposed to not want to damage your own business.

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  • elxeno@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wish they would revert the change or change to something else and then everybody starts to call it formerly X.

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  • MondayToFriday@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wish people would just call it X. If that’s what Elon wants, let him reap the consequences of his crazy decisions.

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• TWeaK@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Just shut the fucking business down already. It’s clear that they cannot meet their debt (accrued through a leveraged buyout, the same practice that killed Toys R Us), and in the meantime they’re accumulating lawsuits knowing full well that they will never have to pay out because they’ll fall under long before the lawsuits are heard, let alone resolved. Meanwhile, anything they do get away with in the meantime becomes something of an established precedent for future bad actors.

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  • lobut@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Doubt he’s going to shut it down before the elections. Perfect time for Musk to do the most damage.

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    • ripcord@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There are a number of bad actors who I'm sure would love to pay into TwitX for the ability to push propaganda, etc. It may be worth it to Misk himself to just keep footing the bill as well for that reason alone.

      I doubt there's much chance of it going under anytime soon.

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• rob299@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  About time, unlabeled ads isn’t even a requirement to make money off of ads, or is it…?

  clicking on an ad generates more revenue then just seeing one if I remember correctly. which seems to be why YouTube encourages users to get use to waiting and clicking on the skip button, if on the browser site theres a chance of a user clicking on the ad and opening it’s link.

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  • EeeDawg101@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Clicking on the ad is what triggers a charge (in terms of cost). Simply showing the ad is basically worthless. At least that’s how it was a while back when I was running a website and I had ads on it. The trick to getting bigger payouts was to make the ads look like part of your content and no so out of place. Twitter is doing just that and typically it is against the terms of use for ad networks, but since it’s their own network I guess that doesn’t really matter.

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    • rob299@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      wait, then how do youtube’s ads on smart tvs generate money? something doesn’t add up because on smart tvs you cannot click the ad in the same way or even at all.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  “This misrepresentation tricks users into trusting content as organic and exacerbates the opportunity for scams to occur,” the complaint states.

  At the time, it wasn’t clear if the issue was a glitch or a deliberate attempt to deceive X users into thinking ads were organic content.

  The Center for Digital Democracy told TechCrunch it believed the FTC should investigate X’s use of stealth ads and impose fines and sanctions.

  The complaint also points out that X may be in violation of an existing 2022 Stipulated Order with the FTC, prohibiting misrepresentation of its advertising practices.

  “X entered into this consent decree with the FTC basically saying they weren’t going to misrepresent how they were targeting ads to users,” says Wiley.

  Though typically, Check My Ads reaches out to companies when it finds issues like these; the ongoing nature of the problem (and lack of a point of contact after Twitter gutted 80% of its workforce, including compliance and engineering), led the organization to believe this could be more than a glitch.

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  The original article contains 1,051 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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